I was unfortunately tied up for the whole afternoon and part of this morning with production issues, but here is a little bit of information about the 2nd keynote for Google I/O 2011.

The keynote for Google I/O 2011 Day 2 is centered on the Chrome browser, and the HTML5 push.

  • Chrome has now 160M active users (on Automation Adventures, the number one browser is Firefox with 35%, followed by Chrome and IE, both with close to 29%)
  • Voice recognition built into Chrome
  • Demo with clicker - easy addition of speech recognition
  • Demo of Google Translation with speech recognition
  • TinkerCad demo of HTML5 and WebGL
  • Chrome WebStore In-app payments: 17 million installed, 2x more time spent in apps, 2.5x more transactions. Literally 1 line of code to activate.
  • Webstore will expand around the world, available in 41 languages.
  • Angry Birds now available in the Chrome Web Store!
  • Chromebooks coming next month. Samsung and Acer will be producing Chromebooks, which will be available June 15th through Amazon.com and Best Buy. Available in 7 countries.
  • Monthly Chromebook subscriptions for businesses ($28/user/month) and schools ($20/user/month). Also starting June 15th. More info here.

The main focus seems to be on ease of management for the IT department: the hardware and OS fade away by being replaced by the netbooks, and the applications are centralized web applications. The main pain will actually be felt by the same IT department, since a lot of the applications in most organizations are not web based. Virtualization is an alternative there, but I haven’t seen a proven and reliable Remote Desktop or Virtual Machine client for Chrome OS yet. Until then, this remains an interesting alternative to installing a browser on a bare machine…