What does this mean? On Black Friday, anyone who calls 888-376-4336 and does a Google Search by voice, will see their results displayed on either the Reuters sign or the NASDAQ sign in Times Square. So, if you say something like “new Jonas Brothers CD,” the display will come up with a giant Google Map complete with signs showing you where you can find that. Also included is the embarrassment that everyone in Times Square has just seen what ridiculous thing you are searching for.

This is all a big promotion for Droid, the new Android phone built by Verizon and being heavily pushed by Google. And the promotion has actually been going on for the past couple of weeks in New York, but it previously has only run during 90 minutes timeslots in the afternoon or night. On Black Friday, it will be running for 20 hours straight. I would love to know how much that advertisement cost.

Here’s a site with the countdown to the event complete with the message: “Droid will do Times Square for 20 hours…” Minds out of the gutter, folks.

source

Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.

We want to take this opportunity to explain why we’re excited about the project and how it is a fundamentally different model of computing.

First, it’s all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn’t trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we’re going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video.

Most of all, we are obsessed with speed. We are taking out every unnecessary process, optimizing many operations and running everything possible in parallel. This means you can go from turning on the computer to surfing the web in a few seconds. Our obsession with speed goes all the way down to the metal. We are specifying reference hardware components to create the fastest experience for Google Chrome OS.

There is still a lot of work to do, and we’re excited to work with the open source community. We have benefited hugely from projects like GNU, the Linux Kernel, Moblin, Ubuntu, WebKit and many more. We will be contributing our code upstream and engaging closely with these and other open source efforts.

Google Chrome OS will be ready for consumers this time next year. Sign up here for updates or if you like building your operating system from source, get involved at chromium.org.

Lastly, here is a short video that explains why we’re so excited about Google Chrome OS.

Update at 8:55PM: Watch the video of our Google Chrome OS event, which took place earlier today.