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Now enjoy two new Bollywood movies every month on YouTube Box Office for free

Movies of the month - ‘Shaitan’ & ‘Pyaar Ka Punchnama’

You asked for it and we have got it. Starting this month, YouTube will feature two new blockbuster movies every month for free on its YouTube Box Office channel (www.youtube.com/boxoffice) for users in India. After the overwhelming response to Band Baaja Baaraat, 3 idiots and Bheja fry 2, YouTube has lined up a special treat for the month of September - featuring the latest edgy entertainer from Anurag Kashyap & Binoy Nambiar - ‘Shaitan’ and the hilarious anti rom-com ‘Pyaar Ka Punchnama’. Shaitan is making its online debut first on YouTube even before its television premiere.

Launched three months back, the Intel sponsored YouTube Box Office channel has already got over 11.5 million views in India and is the #20 most subscribed (all time) channel in India. Apart from featuring full length movies, the channel also engages users with movie trivia and contests. Users can also choose to watch movies from YouTube movie catalogues which offers over 1500 movie titles including over 400 titles from regional movies in languages such as Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil and Bengali.

Now playing:
Shaitan - the gritty crime drama sees Kalki Koechlin play a disturbed teenager who joins a group of rich young friends who get into a mess after a road accident, leading to a seething cauldron of crime and violence.

Catch the excitement on www.youtube.com/boxoffice

Posted by Amit Agrawal, Head of YouTube Content Partnerships, India

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Nine months ago, we launched the Chrome Web Store in the United States, an open marketplace that gives Chrome users an easy way to discover and try the best apps on the web. Since then, the store has gained a lot of momentum and is now home to an ever increasing selection of apps, extensions and themes.

Today, we’re expanding and making the store available in 24 more countries, including India. You’ll now find it much easier to discover and add new apps, extensions and themes to Chrome, across a variety of categories.

To make the store even more useful and relevant, starting today, you’ll be able to access a range of new applications from Indian developers and publishers. You can now listen to your favorite Indian music from Saavn. For those of you with a cricket fix, the ESPN Cricinfo app lets you follow the latest developments in your favorite sport and the TurboCricket app allows you to play your favourite game anywhere. Avid news readers can catch up on the latest Bollywood gossip on Midday and news in Hindi with Jagran.

To try these new apps, as well as tens of thousands of other items in the store, download Google Chrome and visit the Chrome Web Store.

Posted by Guneet Singh, Lead Consumer Marketing and Gautam Gandhi, New Business Development

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[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog, the Google Enterprise Blog, and the Google Green Blog.]

Cloud computing is secure, simple, keeps you productive and saves you money. But the cloud can also save energy. A recent report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Verdantix estimates that cloud computing has the potential to reduce global carbon emissions by millions of metric tons. And Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford who has led several studies on data center energy use, has written that for many enterprises, the cloud “is significantly more energy efficient than using in-house data centers.”

Because we’re committed to sustainability, we sharpened our pencils and looked at our own services to see how they stack up against the alternatives.

We compared Gmail to the traditional enterprise email solutions it’s replaced for more than 4 million businesses. The results were clear: switching to Gmail can be almost 80 times more energy efficient (PDF) than running in-house email. This is because cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate at higher server utilization rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own.

An illustration of inefficient server utilization by smaller companies compared to efficient utilization in the cloud.

If you’re more of a romantic than a businessperson, think of it this way: It takes more energy to send a message in a bottle than it does to use Gmail for a year, as long as you count (PDF) the energy used to make the bottle and the wine you drank.

We ran a similar calculation for YouTube and the results are even more striking: the servers needed to play one minute of YouTube consume about 0.0002 kWh of energy. To put that in perspective, it takes about eight seconds for the human body to burn off that same amount. You’d have to watch YouTube for three straight days for our servers to consume the amount of energy required to manufacture, package and ship a single DVD.

In calculating these numbers, we included the energy used by all the Google infrastructure supporting Gmail and YouTube. Of course, your own laptop or phone also consumes energy while you’re accessing Google, so it’s important to choose an efficient model.

There’s still a lot to learn about the global impacts of cloud computing, but one thing we can say with certainty: bit for bit, email for email, and video for video, it’s more efficient in the cloud.

Posted David Jacobowitz, Program Manager, Green Engineering and Operations

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After successfully traveling to 10 states, covering more than 2000 locations and touching the lives of over 56,00,000 Indians across 120 towns, Google India’s educational Internet Bus is now entering Bihar. Surveys have indicated that more than 15,00,000 people have gone online for the first time after visiting the bus.

In Bihar the bus will visit Patna, Gaya, Bhagalpur, Darbhanga, Bihar Sharif, Arrah, Katihar, Chapra & Purnia.

The custom-designed bus has several computer and mobile terminals on board. These will be used to give a first-hand experience to users about the real life benefits of the Internet.

The bus will showcase informative content in English and Hindi in addition to the basic familiarization on using services like search, email, social networking, online ticketing etc. It will also showcase how data services can be used on a mobile device.

Users across India will be able to follow the bus through its journey, see pictures and videos and join online communities by simply visiting www.google.co.in/internetbus.

Posted by Nishant Nair, Program Manager

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[Cross posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Yesterday our chairman Eric Schmidt took the stage at Dreamforce with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to discuss the evolution of computing. In a wide-ranging conversation, they covered everything from the network computer to the consumerization of IT to the emerging primacy of mobile, social and local. You can watch the keynote here:



Eric pointed out that it’s the cloud that is allowing us to upend the old software model. High cost. Complex. Quickly out-of-date. Difficult to replace. We’ve exhausted what can be done with client-server.

Consumer technology is now shaping enterprise software, and it’s transforming the way we live and work. Ubiquitous. Easy to use. Flexible. Constantly innovating. Built for teams. We’ve embraced a user-first, 100% web approach with Google Apps, and it’s a big reason why more than 40 million people now use Apps. We also announced that 4 million businesses run on Apps and another 5,000 join the movement every day.

But of all the ideas Eric and Marc discussed, one resonated with me most: “Life is short, you should spend it working with people you enjoy.”

Posted by Amit Singh, Vice President, Google Enterprise

It’s that time of the year again for the Chrome team, when we pause on our anniversary to reflect on the amazing life and times of the web. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been three years since we launched our open source web browser, Chrome. Read More

It’s that time of the year again for the Chrome team, when we pause on our anniversary to reflect on the amazing life and times of the web. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been three years since we launched our open source web browser, Chrome.

In that time, the web community has continued to inspire us, bringing the power of the web into all kinds of apps and experiences, with all modern browsers making great strides in speed, simplicity and security. To pay homage to the goodness of the web, we’ve put together an interactive infographic, built in HTML5, which details the evolution of major web technologies and browsers:

(With thanks to our friends at Hyperakt, Vizzuality, mgmt design and GOOD)

In our third year, we’ve also brought Chrome's principles of speed, simplicity and security to a new model of computing: the Chromebook. The Chromebook is pure Chrome—a computer built for everything you ever need to do on the web while doing away with all the usual annoyances of an old, slow PC.

Here’s a quick fly-by through the some of the highlights of the past 12 months on the Chrome platform:

Faster and faster

• We kick off the Year of the Rabbit with a new compilation infrastructure for the V8 JavaScript engine, codenamed “Crankshaft,” which improves JavaScript performance by up to 66 percent.
  
• Chrome’s new settings interface helps you find the right settings quickly with an integrated search box. It also provides direct links to each settings page, which can be copied and pasted for easy troubleshooting.
  
• The omnibox is improved to better suggest partial matches for webpage titles and URLs.
  
• You can optionally enable Chrome Instant, which shows relevant content in the browser window as you type, before you press Enter.
  
• Chrome’s built-in prerendering technology enables sites to build even faster experiences for their users—such as Instant Pages in Google search, which in some cases makes search results appear to load almost instantly.

Simpler and more accessible

• Chrome supports many popular screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver to help visually impaired people better experience the web.
  
• Print Preview, a popular feature request, uses Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer to display the preview, and enables you to save any webpage as a convenient PDF file using the “Print to PDF” option.
  
• Chrome’s icon takes on a simpler look to embody the Chrome spirit, since Chrome is all about making your web experience quicker, lighter and easier for all.

An even more secure platform

• Our integrated and sandboxed PDF viewer enables you to view PDF files on the web without installing additional software. Furthermore, we built an additional layer of security around the PDF viewer called a “sandbox” to help protect you from security attacks that are targeted at PDF files.
  
• Adobe Flash Player is sandboxed on Windows, further protecting you from security attacks and malware targeted at Flash content on the web.
  
• Chrome warns you before downloading some types of malicious files with enhanced Safe Browsing technology. In order to help protect privacy, malicious content is detected without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs that you visit or the files you download.
  
• To provide greater transparency and control over the data that websites store on your computers, Chrome lets you delete Local Shared Objects created by Adobe Flash Player using the browser’s built-in setting dialogs.

Wowzah, the modern web!

• The Chrome Web Store is an open marketplace where you can search for and discover web applications, both free and paid, along with ratings and reviews. Developers can add in-app payments to their apps for a flat 5 percent transaction fee.
  
• Chrome supports WebGL, which brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser with no additional software needed. For a taste of what WebGL can do, check out “3 Dreams of Black,” a 3D music experience for the web browser.
  
• Chrome’s support for the HTML speech input API enables developers to give web apps the ability to transcribe your voice into text. Try it out on www.google.com by clicking on the microphone icon in the search box.
  
• Hardware-accelerated 3D CSS enables snazzier experiences in webpages and apps which use 3D effects.

Delivering a new, simpler model for computing

• Chrome is enterprise ready, with an MSI installer and support for managed group policies. Many organizations such as Vanguard and Procter & Gamble have successfully deployed Chrome to thousands of users in an enterprise setting.
  
• As of this past July, Chromebooks are now available for purchase in eight countries—the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and South Korea. And just like Chrome, the Chromebook always keeps getting better. When you turn your Chromebook on, it updates itself automatically: you get the latest and greatest version of the operating system without having to think about it.
  

There’s more to come. Keep an eye on the Chrome blog to hear about new features and performance improvements as we continue to ship stable channel updates every six weeks. As always, on both Chrome and Chromebooks you’ll be automatically updated to the new versions as soon as they’re released.

Posted by Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher, Software Engineers

(Cross-posted on the Google Enterprise Blog) Read More

(Cross-posted on the Google Enterprise Blog)

The great thing about web apps is that you can access all of your information on the go, and we’ve introduced ways to use Google Apps on a variety of devices like mobile phones and tablets. But it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally find yourself in situations when you don’t have an internet connection, lik

e planes, trains and carpools. When we announced Chromebooks at Google I/O 2011, we talked about bringing offline access to our web apps, and now we’re taking our first steps in that direction. Gmail offline will be available today, and offline for Google Calendar and Google Docs will be rolling out over the next week, starting today.
Gmail Offline is a Chrome Web Store app that’s intended for situations when you need to read, respond to, organize and archive email without an internet connection. This HTML5-powered app is based on the Gmail web app for tablets, which was built to function with or without web access. After you install the Gmail Offline app from the Chrome Web Store, you can continue using Gmail when you lose your connection by clicking the Gmail Offline icon on Chrome’s “new tab” page.

Google Calendar and Google Docs let you seamlessly transition between on- and offline modes. When you’re offline in Google Calendar, you can view events from your calendars and RSVP to appointments. With Google Docs you can view documents and spreadsheets when you don’t have a connection. Offline editing isn’t ready yet, but we know it’s important to many of you, and we’re working hard to make it a reality. To get started using Google Calendar or Google Docs offline, just click the gear icon at the top right corner of the web app and select the option for offline access.

IT administrators can deploy Chrome Web Store apps to users en masse by setting up organizational policies for Chrome.

Today’s world doesn’t slow down when you’re offline and it’s a great feeling to be productive from anywhere, on any device, at any time. We’re pushing the boundaries of modern browsers to make this possible, and while we hope that many users will already find today’s offline functionality useful, this is only the beginning. Support for offline document editing and customizing the amount of email to be synchronized will be coming in the future. We also look forward to making offline access more widely available when other browsers support advanced functionality (like background pages).

Posted by Benoît de Boursetty, Product Manager