The new Acer Chromebook

Creating a better, simpler computer and making it available for everyone is at the core of the Chromebook vision. It’s exciting to see people using Chromebooks as the perfect additional computer in the home, and we continue to work with our partners to make them easy-to-use and more affordable. Today, we’re delighted that our partner Acer is introducing a new addition to the Chromebook family: the new Acer C7 Chromebook.

The new Acer C7 Chromebook delivers a hassle-free computing experience with speed, built-in security and the simplicity of automatic updates. It features a full-size keyboard, fully clickable trackpad, an extra bright 11.6-inch display and over 3.5 hours of battery life. Powered by an Intel Core processor, the Acer Chromebook is fast—boots up in 18 seconds, resumes instantly and high-definition videos play smoothly (yes, videos like Gangnam Style in 1080p, in case you’re one of the few left who hasn’t seen it). You can easily store your stuff on the Chromebook or in the cloud, with a 320GB hard drive and 100GB of free storage on Google Drive.*

As you’d expect from a Chromebook, it’s easy to share with others around the home. Moms, dads, siblings or even your roommate can all have separate accounts and simply log in to get things done. And because Chromebooks bring you the best of Google, if you use products like Gmail, Drive, Maps, YouTube and Google+, your stuff is always available and everything just works.

Starting tomorrow, the Acer Chromebook will be available for $199 in the U.S. on Google Play, BestBuy.com and rolling out this week in select Best Buy stores. In the U.K., it’s available on Google Play, Amazon UK, PC World and Currys. We’re working hard to bring it to more countries soon.

Together with Acer, it’s great to welcome the newest addition to the Chromebook family. We hope it will make a great additional computer for your family, too. New Chromebooks, for everyone.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome & Apps

*You will have 100 GB of free storage for 2 years, starting on the date you redeem the offer on eligible Chrome devices.

Update 11/15: The latest update for the Acer C7 Chromebook enhances battery life to 4 hours. You should get this update when you open your computer for the first time. Thanks to auto-updates, you already have a better computer than the one you bought.

(Cross-posted on the Chrome Blog)

JAM with Chrome: Play music live with your friends online

If you ever dreamed of playing in a band, now’s your chance to be a rock star. JAM with Chrome is an interactive web application that enables friends in different locations to play music together in the Chrome browser on their computers. No matter what your level of talent—from daydreaming air guitarist to music pro—you can JAM together in real time over the web.

When you enter the site, you can choose from a selection of 19 different instruments, from acoustic and bass guitars to drum kits and keyboards. Once you get playing, you can switch instruments as often and as many times as you like.

In the default “easy mode” you can experiment by clicking individual strings, drum pads or keys, or you can play around with the four different autoplay functions and let the machines do the work. Switch to “pro mode” to play any instrument using your keyboard.

Invite up to three friends in different locations to join your JAM via the sharing buttons on the site. Here’s “Keyboard Cat” jamming with his friends:



JAM with Chrome is a Chrome Experiment that uses the latest modern web technologies, including HTML5 features such as the Web Audio API, Websockets, Canvas and CSS3. For more detailed information on the technologies used, check out the technology link in the app.

Go on, get the band together at jamwithchrome.com.

Posted by Emma Turpin, Google Creative Lab

(Cross-posted from the Chrome Blog)

Marking the fall of the Iron Curtain

There are certain events in history that are momentous enough to make you remember where you were at the time. This Friday is the 23rd anniversary of one of those moments—the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

To mark this turning point in history, we’re releasing a collection of online exhibitions under the theme of The Fall of the Iron Curtain. Partners, including The DDR Museum in Berlin, Polish History Museum, Romanian broadcaster TVR and Getty Images, have created 13 exhibitions containing documents, videos and photos telling the stories behind how events unfolded.

Independent historians have also contributed their expertise. For example, Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard University, provides video commentary on events as part of his exhibition The Fall of the Wall: Revelation, not Revolution.

Some of the other exhibitions include:

• Solidarity & the fall of The Iron Curtain - the creation and evolution of the Solidarity trade union leading to Lech Walesa's election as President of Poland in 1990
• Visions of Division - Professor Patrick Major, a specialist in Cold War history, gives an account of life in a divided Germany and the everyday human cost of the Wall
• Years of change - diary of a fictitious author documenting events in Berlin such as the staged elections, the first protests and David Hasselhoff's concert at the wall
• The Berlin Job - a personal account of life in East Berlin made by independent curator Peter Millar, one of the only non-German correspondents in East Berlin in the 1980s
• Romanian Revolution - a series of four exhibitions containing more than 50 videos documenting the live TV transmission of the overthrow of Romanian dictator Ceausescu

The Fall of the Iron Curtain is the latest chapter in the work of the Google Cultural Institute, following the launch last month of 42 online historical exhibitions telling the stories behind major events of the last century. You can explore all the exhibitions on www.google.com/culturalinstitute and follow us on our Google+ page.

If you’re a partner interested in working with the Google Cultural Institute to turn your archives into online exhibitions, we’d love to hear from you—please fill out this form.

Posted by Mark Yoshitake, Google Cultural Institute

(Cross-posted from the Google Europe blog)

Vote first, and watch the results on YouTube tonight

Today is the big day! For those of you in the U.S., today means any number of things -- the end of "I approve this message", an hour off from work to vote, or simply the day when the country chooses its leader for the next four years. Regardless, it’s a day we’ve all been waiting for and the suspense is almost over.

After you’ve come back from your local polling place, settle in with YouTube and watch the results come in. We’ll have live coverage on the YouTube Elections Hub starting at 7 p.m. ET, when the first polls close on the East Coast. Follow along as the votes are counted, and watch live-stream coverage from ABC News, Al Jazeera, Larry King, the New York Times, Phil DeFranco, Univision, and the Wall Street Journal until the next President is named.

We’ll also have a live results map featuring real-time updates from the Associated Press -- you’ll be able to visualize and interact with the Electoral College map, as well keep track of the popular vote breakdown throughout the evening. 

Ward Bullard, YouTube Elections Team, recently watched Robot Video Game Presidents?!

Documenting your vote: send us your videos

Tomorrow, voters across the United States will head to the polls to cast their ballot in the 2012 election. Regardless of whether you’re a veteran or first-time voter, taking part in the electoral process is a powerful experience, and one that we know many of you will document in some way, just like you did in 2008.

We want to see and hear from you tomorrow. Whether you’re vlogging about which candidate you support, capturing footage of the long line at your polling place, or encouraging your friends to get out of the house and go vote, we’re inviting you to send us your Election Day videos. You can either tweet them to @YouTubePolitics or include #YouTubePolitics in the video title, and a selection will be featured on the YouTube Elections Hub.

Be sure to check your state law for guidelines about what polling place activities are allowed where you live, and consult the Citizen Media Law Project’s Documenting Your Vote project before bringing your camera to your voting location.

Looking for a place to watch the returns come in? The YouTube Elections Hub will feature live coverage from ABC News, Al Jazeera, Larry King, New York Times and BuzzFeed, Phil DeFranco, Univision, and the Wall Street Journal. So you won’t have to go anywhere else to watch all different perspectives, all in one place.

Olivia Ma, YouTube News & Politics, recently watched “Political Kombat ‘12: Obama vs Romney”

AMBER Alerts for missing children now in Google Search and Maps

Today we are launching AMBER Alerts coordinated by National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the Google Public Alerts platform. Public Alerts are designed to bring you emergency alerts when and where they’re relevant to you, and AMBER Alerts aim to help bring abducted children home safely.

If you’re using Google Search or Maps on desktop and mobile you’ll see an AMBER Alert if you search for related information in a particular location where a child has recently been abducted and an alert was issued. You’ll also see an alert if you conduct a targeted search for the situation. By increasing the availability of these alerts through our services, we hope that more people will assist in the search for children featured in AMBER Alerts and that the rates of safe recovery will rise.

AMBER Alerts will provide information about the abducted child and any other details about the case as they become available. Additional details could include the make and model of the vehicle he/she was abducted in or information about the alleged abductor.

Screenshot for a test version of an AMBER alert

The US Department of Justice’s AMBER Alert™ Program is a voluntary partnership between law enforcement agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies and others to engage the entire community in the most serious child-abduction cases. We are working with NCMEC, who will provide the AMBER Alert data to Google and make it possible to display information in Public Alerts.

We’re working closely with Missing Children Europe and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection to try and scale this service to more countries. We’ll keep exploring different ways to improve child protection through innovative technologies, like what has been used to reduce exploitation and improve reporting to NCMEC.

Posted by Phil Coakley, software engineer, Google Public Alerts team

Celebrating Leonardo Torres-Quevedo, Spanish inventor of the world’s first computer game

What does a cable car in Niagara Falls have to do with the world’s first chess-playing machine? Surprisingly, both were inventions of Spanish civil engineer Leonardo Torres-Quevedo. Next week, as part of our ongoing effort to celebrate Europe’s computing heritage, we’re commemorating Torres-Quevedo’s legacy and his remarkable machine—"El Ajedrecista" (in English, "The Chess Player")—in partnership with the Telecommunication Engineering department of the Technical University of Madrid.

Photo thanks to Wikimedia Commons
Torres-Quevedo’s inventions span many fields. He was the second in the world to demonstrate wireless remote control, beaten to the post only by Nikola Tesla. His designs for airships were used by both the French and British during WWI. He was a global leader in cable car design, creating the “Spanish aero car” over the Niagara Whirlpool which, nearly a century on, remains a tourist attraction. However, his most remarkable achievements were in the field of automation, developing machines that are antecedents to what we now call computers and robots.

Torres-Quevedo’s ambitions were bold. As Scientific American proclaimed in 1915: “He would substitute machinery for the human mind.” In the 1890s, Torres-Quevedo built a series of mechanical devices that solved algebraic equations. In 1920 he wowed a Paris audience with an electromechanical arithmometer with a typewriter attachment. You simply typed a formula—say, “24x48”—and the machine would calculate and automatically type the answer “=1152” in reply.

But El Ajedrecista, an algorithmically powered machine that could play an end-game of chess against a human opponent completely automatically, is his most notable creation. Although it’s a far cry from Deep Blue, El Ajedrecista can lay claim to being the world’s first (analog) computer game.

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Photos thanks to Museo Torres Quevedo
The machine didn’t just calculate its moves—it had mechanical arms that physically moved its pieces, in the form of electrical jacks, across a grid. In later models the arm mechanism was replaced by magnets, and play took place on a more ordinary-looking chess board. You couldn’t cheat the machine as it could spot illegal moves; and you couldn’t win, as the game always started at a point (machine’s King and Rook versus human’s King) from which the machine could never lose.

In honor of El Ajedrecista’s 100th birthday, we’re working with the Telecommunication Engineering department of the Technical University of Madrid to stage a conference commemorating Torres-Quevedo’s legacy. The conference, taking place on November 7, will feature lectures and panel discussions, as well as an exhibition of Torres-Quevedo’s devices—including El Ajedrecista itself. Attendance is free—if you want to join us, request an invitation.

Posted by Lynette Webb, Senior Manager, External Relations