There must be some new force pulling West Coast tech CEOs to visit Boston. Last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was in town; yesterday it was Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

To mark the unusual occasion, Google invited a raft of journalists to its offices in Cambridge for an open, on-the-record roundtable discussion with Schmidt. Google’s Cambridge site director Steve Vinter served as moderator. Many of the questions tossed Schmidt’s way focused on specific Google projects such as Chrome, Wave, and Android 2.0, and when they’ll evolve into major consumer-facing offerings. While some of that was interesting, I thought Schmidt’s comments on a few of the bigger strategy and policy questions revealed more about the company’s outlook on the world.

Below are some of the high points from the discussion—including Schmidt’s thoughts on strategies for economic recovery, why people fear Google, and what role the company may play in the survival of journalism.

Google is growing fast in Cambridge.

Vinter said Google’s Cambridge office, which handles a variety of projects from Google Friend Connect to Google Book Search, has passed the 200-employee mark and will be “hiring very aggressively” in the coming months. (That’s in stark contrast to Microsoft, which reduced its headcount yesterday by some 800 people, including some here in Cambridge.) “Virtually every project we have is scaling up,” Vinter said. Schmidt (who attended both Princeton and Berkeley) said Google was attracted to Cambridge in the first place because it “likes cities with extremely good technical universities.”

Many more people will be getting a look at Google Wave in the near future.

Up to now, Google has been carefully parsing out invitations to Google Wave, its experimental real-time e-mail/chat/collaboration/document sharing platform. Schmidt said the company is “getting ready for a broader distribution very soon—weeks, not months.” He said feedback on the software from early users has been positive, but the company has been slow to invite in more users for fear of outages. “So far the experiment has yielded a very innovative model and a lot of buzz, and now we want to see if it can scale,” he said.

Google has very big plans for the Chrome browser and its bigger cousin, Chrome OS.

Adoption of Google’s Chrome Web browser is progressing “very well,” Schmidt said. But for Google, Chrome is “more than a browser,” he said. “It’s a platform for powerful Web-based apps that you can’t really deliver in cloud computing without having a browser that can support cloud apps.” Making Chrome work fast, maintaining a clean separation between applications running in different tabs or windows, and supporting the new HTML 5 standard “are central to making the apps model work,” Schmidt said. “And Chrome’s success is a necessary precondition to the success of Chrome OS,” he said, since the one is derived from the other. “We have a lot riding on Chrome.”

The first public version of Chrome OS will be coming out by the end of 2009, Schmidt said. But the operating system won’t be a serious competitor for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or other operating systems until …Next Page »

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Shareaholic founder Jay Meattle was in touch today to say that his Cambridge startup has raised its first round of angel funding. Back in July, I reviewed Shareaholic’s popular browser plugin, which makes it easy to save or share material found on the Web via common social networking, social bookmarking, and news aggregator services.

Meattle wasn’t specific about the size of the round, saying it amounts to “a few hundred thousand” dollars. The list of funders, however, is a who’s who of Web 2.0 entrepreneurship and investing around Boston, including one serial entrepreneur, David Cancel, who worked with Meattle at both of his last two companies, Lookery and Compete.com.

The full list of Shareaholic’s angel investors includes:

—Ed Roberts, founder, MIT Entrepreneurship Center; co‐founder, Sohu.com
—Dharmesh Shah, founder and chief technology officer, HubSpot
—Eric Dobkin, Advisory Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.
—Brian Balfour, co‐founder, Viximo
—David Cancel, co‐founder, Compete
—Andrew Payne, investor in Care.com, Digium, HubSpot, and SmartFlix; co‐founder, FanSnap
—Brian Shin, founder and CEO, Visible Measures

Cancel, Payne, and Shin also serve on Shareaholic’s advisory board, along with Rob Go of Boston-based Spark Capital.

“I couldn’t think of a better group,” Meattle says. “They have deep knowledge and expertise in the space we’re playing in. We lean on them for advice all the time—they’ve all ‘been there and done that’ again and again.”

When I last talked with Meattle about Shareaholic, he said the company had spent a long time getting its browser plugin to the point where it’s comprehensive and easy to use, and that the coming months would be devoted to experimenting with different ways of monetizing the service. He confirmed that plan today. “We plan to spend the next few months determining what the best use of our data and user reach assets are,” Meattle says. “We have some pretty good hunches and have a lot of exciting stuff in the pipeline.”

Given the momentum the company has built up and the opportunities it has identified, “the time was right to raise some money to further accelerate and support our product roadmap,” Meattle adds.

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[Updated 9:20 p.m. EDT 7/10/09 with responses from Google; see the sections marked "Update" below]

Yesterday Google announced that the “My Location” feature familiar to anyone who’s used Google Maps on a mobile device—the little blue button that shows you your position on a map—is now available to people accessing Google Maps from their laptop or desktop computers as well (as long as they’re using the latest versions of the Firefox or Chrome browsers). But there’s a problem: Users are reporting in large numbers today that the My Location feature is erratic, placing them in the wrong city and occasionally on the wrong continent.

Behind this phenomenon, it turns out, is a story about competing ideas on the best way to endow Web-based applications like mapping programs with an awareness of their location—and about the race between companies like Google, Microsoft, and Boston’s Skyhook Wireless to control the way location information is fed to these applications. Skyhook’s CEO, Ted Morgan, gave me his perspective on the Google Maps development in an interview this morning. (See below for our Q&A.)

You might think that all browsers would handle location-finding in the same way. And that’s the ideal—the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a draft Geolocation API (application programming interface) specification that spells out how browsers should pass the details about a computer’s location from the computer itself to the Web applications running inside the browser. But as Morgan explains, the W3C standard doesn’t specify where or how the browser should get this information from the computer—which leaves room open for competing approaches, and potentially for back-room deals.

Several years ago, Skyhook developed a browser plugin called Loki that taps into a computer’s Wi-Fi chip, takes a reading of all nearby Wi-Fi access points, and uses Skyhook’s proprietary database of access point locations around the world to triangulate the device’s location. The Apple iPhone uses this Skyhook technology whenever its Safari browser or its built-in Google Maps application request location data.

But when Google rolled out the “My Location” feature for laptop and desktop computers, the company decided to use its own geolocation algorithms rather than Skyhook’s. That was possible because the Mozilla Foundation built Google’s algorithms into the latest version of its open-source browser, Firefox 3.5, which was released on June 30. (Google also built the algorithms, not surprisingly, into its own Chrome browser.)

Google’s geolocation technology is similar in principle to Skyhook’s—it also depends largely on information about nearby Wi-Fi access points—but the accuracy of the locations actually produced by the new “My Location” feature seems to vary wildly, as users have been discovering over the last day and half. Judging from posts on Twitter, the Google system is placing some people thousands of miles away from their actual locations.

An unusual number of people, for example, report that the My Location feature shows them as being in downtown Austin, TX, even if they’re half a continent away. “Google Maps’ new ‘Show My Location’ feature puts me in the middle of Austin, TX. I’m actually downtown Manhattan,’ PhoneTag.com co-founder Mark Dillon tweeted today.

While Austin may be the center of the tech world for some South by Southwest addicts, it clearly hasn’t experienced any actual jump in population since Thursday. The problem, according to Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan, lies in the way Google collects the data behind its Wi-Fi-based positioning system. For information about the locations of access points, Google relies on crowdsourcing—it quietly gathers local readings every time someone uses a Google app on an iPhone or a Blackberry, or some other mobile device.

Crowdsourcing is an inherently sloppy approach, according to Morgan. Skyhook’s own approach is to send Wi-Fi-sensing vehicles down every highway, street, and alley, methodically establishing the position and strength of every access point they pass (most are broadband routers owned by local businesses and residents). Morgan says Skyhook has also developed ways of correcting for the fact that access points sometimes move—for example, when someone relocates their home from Austin to Manhattan.

[UPDATE: Google offers a different reason for the inaccuracies. Reached by e-mail this evening, Google communications officer Elaine Filadelfo said users having issues with accuracy "are likely users who are not using Wi-Fi, for which we can generally provide a more accurate location. Without Wi-Fi, we base location on IP address, which can be inaccurate depending on your ISP and its location."]

Morgan would like to give every developer working on location-aware Web applications the opportunity to tap into Skyhook’s more accurate database through Loki. The problem is that …Next Page »

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ZeeVee, the Littleton, MA-based startup focused on helping people watch high-definition Internet video on their TVs, today introduced a new version of its free video browser. Formerly called Zviewer—and originally designed for the ZvBox, the firm’s PC-to-TV-over-coaxial-cable appliance—the browser is now called Zinc, and runs on any Windows XP or Vista computer. (A Mac version is coming soon.)

Zinc is designed for viewers who want to hook up their PCs to their televisions and then navigate large amounts of Internet video content from across the living room—the so-called “lean back” mode, as opposed to “lean forward” mode common when you’re watching video directly on your laptop or desktop computer. As such, the Zinc interface is dominated by big tiles and brief, simple command menus. Users flip through TV episodes or movies using either their computer keyboard or a remote control compatible with Windows Media Center software, such as ZeeVee’s own ZvRemote.

In concept, Zinc is very similar to Boxee, a popular Internet video browser for the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Zinc and Boxee don’t compete directly, at least for now, since the Mac version of Zinc and the Windows version of Boxee aren’t yet publicly available. But both are examples of an emerging genre of media browsers that make it easy for TV owners to access TV episodes and movies over their Internet connections.

The overt function of Zinc and similar browsers, says ZeeVee CEO Vic Odryna, is “presenting choice in a unified way,” as opposed to having to surf to each provider’s video portal on the Web. “This way I can check out what’s on Amazon using the same interface that shows what’s on Netflix or ABC or Fox, through a very clean interface that shows what episodes are available and what I’ve already watched. It’s very TiVo-like.”

But these browsers, along with Internet TV appliances such as Apple TV and the Roku Player, are also helping to change the economy of mass entertainment. By eliminating the technical and navigational barriers that once made it difficult to access Internet video from the big screens of conventional televisions, the new video aggregators threaten to further erode the cable networks’ historical stranglehold over home video entertainment.

And that’s finally starting to make the cable companies nervous, according to Odryna. “Even nine months ago, the viewpoint was ‘You kids can go play all you want, [Internet video on TV] is just a toy.’ Now the tone is changing really fast. ”

Zinc’s predecessor, Zviewer, was first released as a standalone piece of software last November. But Zinc improves on it in several big ways. It allows access to more content—including all CBS shows and instant Netflix movies—as well as more information about each show and simpler navigation between them. The company says the browser can be used to access more than 15,000 movies and tens of thousands of TV shows. Because it’s based on the Mozilla code base, users also have the option of installing Zinc as a plugin for Firefox, rather than downloading the stand-alone Windows application. (A Macintosh version could be out as early as next month, Odryna says. ZeeVee allowed me to test an early version on my own Mac, and it worked nearly flawlessly.)

The evolution of Zinc is itself an interesting case study in the fast-changing market for video technology. Originally, Zviewer was developed as the user interface for the ZvBox 100, introduced by ZeeVee in May 2008. The ZvBox 100 contained a sophisticated encoder/modulator that transformed streaming video output from a Windows PC into a radio-frequency HDTV signal that could then travel over the coaxial cables already installed in most households and be displayed on any television in the house. The idea was cool, but the implementation was flawed. I tested out the $499 ZvBox 100 at home last September, and ran into so many technical hurdles while trying to make it work that I reluctantly concluded the device just wasn’t ready for prime time.

Odryna told me this week that he more or less agrees with that assessment. “What did we learn? First, that the complexities of installation were really too much for a lot of people. Another problem was cost. Even though this was a piece of equipment that would bring $20,000 in the broadcast world, the $500 price tag was too high. Then there was the complexity of asking a PC to do what we wanted—to broadcast in 720-line resolution. It worked in a lot of cases, but not everywhere.”

The company ultimately abandoned the ZvBox 100 after selling fewer than 10,000 units, Odryna says. “Had we continued to ride that horse, we would probably be dead as a company,” he says.

But as the ZvBox 100’s prospects with consumers sank, something unexpected happened. “From the day we launched the product,” says Odryna, “we got a huge deluge of calls from the commercial world”—meaning institutions such as hotels, restaurants, bars, hospitals, and airports that need to supply TV programming to large numbers of consoles and are looking for a cheap way to get high-definition signals to them. “If you walk into a hotel today, they all have HDTVs, but …Next Page »

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Three quiet and unknown Finnish engineers in their late thirties, Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, have spent their working careers at the engineering software company Tekla in Finland. Their clients have used the software they created to model several well-known buildings, including Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, New York’s Hearst Tower, the famous ‘Bird’s Nest’ that is Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, and the world’s tallest building, Burj Dubai.

But if matters had turned out a little differently, these men—and a former colleague named Kati Suominen (now Kati Borgers) who could not be present at the interview—might have become known as the Fathers and Mother of the World Wide Web browser.

[Editor's note: This article is our first from Juha-Pekka Tikka, Xconomy's new Fellow from Stanford University's Innovation Journalism program. "JP," a reporter at Ilta-Sanomat, a major national newspaper in Finland, will be based in our Xconomy San Diego offices.]

According to the trio, whom I met earlier this year in Finland, the Internet’s rise and emergence as a daily working tool might have happened a year earlier than it did had their group been able to complete their project.

The four Finns developed a graphical, point-and-click Internet browser a year before the pioneering Mosaic browser on which Netscape Communications was based: the historical Netscape IPO in August 1995 is widely credited with starting the Internet boom.

“Our 1991 X Window system browser, ‘Erwise,’ showed that a net browser was possible. We were ahead of the times. The next step, to commercialize it, did not happen,” Kim Nyberg says.

Aside from some local media, the Finns have never before been interviewed about this remarkable story. But Erwise has an important place in the Internet’s birth history. And its fate offers a case study of what happens when invention and innovation are not accompanied by funding, talent infusion, and a strong venture capital market or angel investor presence—all ingredients that Silicon Valley (where Mosaic was funded and developed) takes for granted.

In the U.S., commercialization of the browser, now so much a part of our everyday lives, began in 1994, after Marc Andreessen left the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where he and Eric Bina had developed the Mosaic browser the previous year. Andreessen had moved to California following his December 1993 graduation and teamed up with Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark, backed by venture capital powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, to form Mosaic Communications, later renamed Netscape Communications. Europe was quickly left out in the cold.

But for a few key factors, it didn’t have to be that way. In 1991, Nyberg, Sydänmaanlakka, Rantanen, and Suominen were young IT undergraduate students at HUT, Helsinki University of Technology. The campus is actually located in Espoo, just a few miles from Helsinki and only half a mile away from the headquarters of Nokia Corporation. At that time, Nokia was not internationally known.

The four were about half-way through their studies when they met that September at a HUT course on designing and coding software.

In Switzerland, meanwhile, Tim Berners-Lee had just laid the groundwork for the World Wide Web at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). He thought the Web would be a useful tool for researchers and others but was frustrated at its pace of growth, which he partly attributed to the lack of a point-and-click browser. As he notes in his 1999 book Weaving the Web, “We were so busy trying to keep the Web going that there was no way we could develop browsers ourselves, so we energetically suggested to everyone everywhere that the creation of browsers would make useful projects for software students at universities.”

How did this project end up in Finland? It was largely because …Next Page »

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The Mobile Internet World trade show, produced in Boston in 2007 and 2008 by the Trendsmedia events division of Boston-based market research firm Yankee Group, will be transplanted to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009 and revamped as a “more intimate” conference focused on networking and education, according to a Trendsmedia announcement.

The announcement, e-mailed to 2008 conference attendees today, said the decision to move the convention from the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center to the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport Hotel and drop the exhibit-hall showcase aspect of the event was “based on popular demand,” but that it would also allow Yankee Group to avoid “supporting major trade show costs and resources.”

One mobile executive recently told Xconomy that the program, the size of the crowd, and the volume of business-development opportunities at Mobile Internet World 2008 were disappointingly slim. So the move to the Bay Area could well represent an attempt to repackage the conference—which is aimed at executives from wireless operators, application developers, and other companies involved in delivering services and information via mobile Web browsers—to have a bigger payoff for attendees.

In the Bay Area, the conference will also be closer to two new centers of power in the mobile applications business: Cupertino, CA-based Apple, whose decision to open up the iPhone to third-party application developers has created a huge new market for mobile software, and Mountain View, CA-based Google, whose open-source Android mobile operating system is expected to further disrupt the industry.

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Allegedly, surfing the Web is a leisure activity for a growing number of people. I wouldn’t know—my job as a technology blogger obliges me to surf the Web all day at work, so if I have to use the Web from home, it’s usually because I’m taking care of some task like paying bills, uploading photos, or getting driving directions. But for people who do use the Web as a hangout, there are more and more ways to make it a social experience. And one company, Hamburg, Germany-based Weblin, is optimistic enough about the future of its animated chat service—which gives surfers inch-tall avatars that can communicate directly with the avatars of other Weblin members visiting the same Web pages—that it has expanded to the United States, starting with an office outside Boston.

If you belonged to Weblin (I’m guessing the name is a combination of “Web” and “gremlin”) and you had downloaded the company’s Windows-based plugin, your customized avatar or small-w weblin would be standing on the status bar at the bottom of this browser window right now. If another Weblin member happened to be reading this Xconomy article at the same time, their weblin would also appear. You could then chat, joke, or flirt with that person via text balloons that show up above your weblin, the same way avatars communicate in virtual worlds like Second Life.

You can even make your weblin smile, wave, dance, or run. So what Mystery Science Theater 3000 did for horrible B-movies and what Lycos Cinema is doing for online video, Weblin does for the entire Web (although in practice, you’ll only run into other weblins at a small fraction of websites, since there are only about 10,000 to 100,000 Weblin users online at any given time).

“Even with social networking, the Web is not a social place; a typical website doesn’t allow you to chat with other visitors,” says Jan Andresen, Weblin’s co-founder and CEO, who’s based in Hamburg but was traveling on the East Coast when I reached him by phone last week. Yes, Andresen acknowledges, you can leave a text comment at your friend’s blog or their Facebook Super-Wall. But that’s like deciding you’re only going to communicate with your family by leaving sticky notes on the fridge, he says. “Why not interact instantly with other people, make jokes, and see their reactions? It’s so much more normal.”

Well, “normal” if you don’t mind a bunch of cartoon characters sauntering around your Web browser. And the 20- to 35-year-old users who are Weblin’s main target audience probably don’t. (Indeed, the system still bears the stamp of the virtual-classroom application, developed by CTO and co-founder Heiner Wolf, on which it’s based.) But for older or more mission-oriented Web users like me, Andresen agrees, a crowd of weblins might be a distraction. “If you have to book a flight or finish your spreadsheet, you don’t do it in a pub,” he says. “But maybe you’re at home, you’re bored, you have a glass of wine next to you, and you just want to be entertained. We call that moment ‘chilling.’ For that time, Weblin is ideal.”

Andresen and Wolf launched Weblin in 2006 and have raised $1.3 million in funding from a combination of private investors and the High Tech Grunderfonds, a public-private initiative that invests in early-stage technology startups in Germany. The startup’s technology is built atop XMPP, an open-source instant messaging platform formerly known as Jabber. Andresen says that Weblin hit the 1-million-member mark in September, and that about 10,000 people are downloading the Windows plugin every day. (There’s also a purely browser-based version of the system called “Weblin Lite” that works on Mac and Linux computers, but it assigns you a random avatar that does not persist as you travel from Web page to Web page.)

The company hopes to make money in two ways. The first, more predictable revenue stream will come from selling ads, which will pop up in the same transparent layer over the browser window that the weblins themselves inhabit. But while that may sound like another annoying distraction, Andresen says …Next Page »

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When you open the Google Maps application on the Apple iPhone and click the “target” button, the device pulls up a local map and shows your current position as a blue dot. You could easily do the same thing on your laptop—if, that is, your Web browser could communicate with a location-sensing device in your computer, such as its Wi-Fi chip.

And soon it will. Mozilla, the Mountain View, CA-based organization behind the Firefox browser, revealed yesterday that future versions of Firefox will be location-aware—meaning they’ll have built-in software that taps into a computer’s Wi-Fi chip or other wireless sensors, figures out the machine’s current latitude and longitude, and feeds that information (with the user’s consent) to any website that requests it. And to test the idea, Mozilla released an experimental Firefox plugin called Geode that does exactly that, using the Loki location-finding system developed by Boston’s Skyhook Wireless. Skyhook says the Mozilla deal could foreshadow a time when Loki is built into all browsers.

Loki, which determines a machine’s location by comparing the IDs of nearby Wi-Fi access points to Skyhook’s national database of Wi-Fi networks, was already available as a free download for Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. For Geode, according to Skyhook co-founder and vice president of business development Mike Shean, the company made some minor tweaks to comply with the World Wide Web Consortium’s draft geolocation specification and to add privacy-protection features requested by Mozilla. Loki also comes with a toolbar and a logo, whereas Geode, once installed, runs invisibly. But “under the covers it’s the same system,” Shean says.

Shean said talks between Skyhook and Mozilla began shortly after last January’s announcement of the deal between Skyhook and Apple that put Skyhook’s proprietary Wi-Fi Positioning System on the iPhone. “Since the launch of the iPhone and the ability that Apple has given to developers to leverage location, the market around location-based services has been on a pretty aggressive upswing, and that has also manifested itself in the browser world,” Shean says. “The browser folks and the laptop folks are looking at ways to incorporate location into what they do, and that’s the reason that Mozilla approached us—because we obviously are the only ones really offering Wi-Fi-based location in the Web world for laptops and other Wi-Fi devices.”

In its blog, Mozilla Labs, the organization’s R&D wing, said yesterday that Geode is intended to give Web developers an opportunity to experiment with “location-aware experiences” ahead of the official implementation of geolocation capabilities in Firefox 3.1, which is expected to be released in beta form later this year. So far, there are only three examples of websites that grab location information from Geode: a “Food Finder” page, developed by Mozilla Labs’ head of user experience Aza Raskin, that plots a user’s location on a Google map and shows nearby eateries; Fire Eagle, a Yahoo service that acts as a central registry for users’ locations; and the Pownce file-sharing/social-networking service, which can show members’ locations on their profiles by checking in with Geode or Fire Eagle.

But more examples are on the way, according to Shean. “We’re working with literally dozens of content providers and other companies that use maps,” he says. “Over the next several weeks you’ll see a whole slew of different websites rolling out with this technology.”

And in the long run, Skyhook would like to see the Loki technology built into all Web browsers, Shean says: “We’re very pleased to see Mozilla leading the way around location in the browser, but we are actually working with all of the browser providers to discuss opportunities to bundle our technology into their software.”

Update 10/8/08 2:00 pm: I just learned of another website using Geode for location-based customization: Outside.in Radar, a section of Brooklyn, NY-based hyperlocal news site Outside.in where users can see news, discussions, and alerts specific to their location.

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Over the last week, I’ve had several people tell me that the most interesting thing about Google Chrome isn’t the browser itself, but the way Google chose to present it to the world: via a comic book. Indeed, for at least a day or two, Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome comic—which was accidentally leaked to journalists over the Labor Day weekend, before Google’s official release of the software—was the only information available about the project. Which meant that thousands of Internet users, for perhaps the first time in their adult lives, found themselves reading an extended comic—a genre familiar to millions of adult manga readers in Japan but still mainly relegated to the kids’ sections of U.S. bookstores.

I wondered aloud in a column last week whether all that exposure might help put the comic genre back on the map as a vehicle for serious fiction and non-fiction work. On Monday, I got a chance to put that question to Scott McCloud himself. The author of a bestselling trilogy of comic books about the comic genre’s history, future, and practice—Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006)—McCloud is both the profession’s leading theoretician and one of its most versatile practitioners. He’s also a true geek, and has had his eye on the Web for more than a decade, writing and drawing about its potential as the medium for a new generation of comics that would be liberated from the printed page by emerging interface paradigms such as hyperlinking, zooming, and scrolling.

At its most basic, after all, a comic is just a sequence of pictures that tells a story. And computers and the Web offer many new ways to create and arrange these sequences and to move from panel to panel—they supply what McCloud called, in Reinventing Comics, an “infinite canvas.” Which helps explain how Google was able to interest McCloud in the Chrome project. McCloud says, as you’ll read below, that one of the aesthetic ideas driving the Chrome developers (though this idea didn’t make it into his 38-page comic about the browser) was to “sweep the path clean”—essentially, to get out of the way of content developers and Web users by reducing the software’s onscreen footprint, as well as its functional bells and whistles, to the bare minimum. That’s music to the ears of an artist like McCloud.

Here’s the full text of our interview.

Xconomy: Tell me how the comic came about. How did Google get you on board, and how did you do the research and gather the visual materials you needed?

Scott McCloud: I was first approached by Eric Antonow at Google. He had actually had me out to speak at the Googleplex in August of 2007, during the tour for Making Comics, my last book. He knew that Chrome was coming up—they had been working on it for a year and a half —and he had a sense that comics might be a good way to help explain the project.

But beyond that, it really only took shape when I came up to the campus and we started brainstorming about it. This was Eric, and another Googler, Anna-Christina Douglas, and we were joined by a third, Mark Sabec. In brainstorming we considered a lot of possible forms. Everything was up in the air. We didn’t know if it would be print or online. We didn’t know what sort of length. We weren’t sure what the focus would be. But gradually we came to agreement on what would be an effective strategy.

And then the research was primarily these video interviews that we did with about 20 engineers. These were substantial interviews, running on average about 30 to 40 minutes, some longer. And they had markers and a whiteboard and would occasionally use it, but that was about it for visuals. It was mostly just these explanations, which we then culled through and tried to find a common narrative. I took this sort of raw transcript and pared it down. But [it was] still pretty rough around the edges. And I tried to pound it into a coherent, connected story and then make it visual.

X: You must have had to wait around for the developers to finish certain things about the look and feel of Chrome before you could represent it in the comic.

SM: There were only one or two visual elements that we were hanging on—one or two icons that changed. But for the most part, its shape was concrete enough that I was able to work concurrently in that last couple of months. For example, they knew the shape of the tabs. I wasn’t drawing screen-shot-level detail. My cartoon version of Chrome was …Next Page »

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Has anyone else noticed the resemblance between Google’s logo for its new Web browser, Chrome, and the electronic game Simon, launched by Milton Bradley in 1978? Scroll down for a side-by-side comparison.

Simon and its cousin Merlin were two of my favorite toys as a kid. Knowing how Googlers also love their games, I’m betting that there’s a genetic connection here. Especially since 2008 marks Simon’s 30th anniversary, and Google also seems to be fond of commemorating obscure anniversaries and dates.

Look closely: the Chrome logo uses the same four colors as Simon—green, yellow, red, and sky blue. The logo’s colored panels are made to look like plastic buttons, right down to the recessed black base underneath. They’re even placed in the same order, moving counter-clockwise from upper right. The only real difference between the logo and the game is that in the Chrome logo, the blue button has been moved into the center.

Of course, there’s no cosmic significance to the resemblance. It’s just an interesting addition to the long, distinguished history of the Web browser logo as a genre. In its roundness, the Chrome logo sticks to the age-old formula, which may have started with the spinning globe in the logo for NCSA Mosaic (which, as many digital natives may be unaware, was the grandfather of all Web browsers). That formula continued with the Netscape Navigator badge, the Internet Explorer logo, and the snazzy Firefox logo (see below).

For a long time—especially before the broadband era—the main purpose of the browser logo seemed to be to pulsate, spin, and flash, either to entertain users or to reassure them that something was still happening behind the scenes while they endured the endless waits for Web pages to download. Of course, browser logos also served to brand the programs (as if you couldn’t tell them apart from their behavior).

But lately, the browser logo seems to be falling out of favor, at least as the kind of comforting (or intrusive, depending on your point of view) presence that it used to be. The Firefox logo doesn’t even appear as part of the “chrome” for Firefox 3 (that’s Web developer jargon for all of the toolbars, buttons, scrollbars, tabs, and other graphical stuff around an actual Web page). And the Google Chrome logo isn’t part of Google Chrome’s chrome—it only turns up in the marketing paraphernalia.

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While the tech-blog world is exhausting itself testing and writing about Google Chrome, the new open-source Web browser released by the search giant on Tuesday, I’m still just having fun paging back and forth through the 38-page Scott McCloud Web comic that Google commissioned to explain the whole project. A lot of Silicon Valley companies, when they’re launching big new products, will rent a hotel ballroom, erect a glitzy set, and invite a bunch of journalists and pundits to a scripted dog-and-pony show. Chrome’s launch may mark the first time in history that a company simply hired a comic book artist instead.

Google couldn’t have found a likelier candidate than McCloud, who is the author of Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006), and has written (or should I say drawn?) extensively about how the Web is expanding the boundaries of comics as a genre. It’s a perfect pairing to see McCloud—who has done comics on topics as technical as the constraints imposed on digital-comics authors by HTML tables—writing about something as fundamental to the Web as the browser itself.

If you haven’t heard the story behind Chrome already, it’s Google’s attempt to update the very notion of the Web browser—which was, after all, invented 15 years ago—to reflect the realities of the Web 2.0 era. These days, if you’re on the Web, chances are you’re interacting with an application rather than simply consuming content. “People are watching and loading videos, chatting with each other, playing Web-based games…all these things that didn’t exist when browsers were first created,” Google software engineer Pam Greene points out in McCloud’s comic. (She’s one of the many Googlers whose words McCloud drew upon for the comic. His drawings of her remind me a lot of the Jodie/Julie character in McCloud’s terrific experimental Web comic, The Right Number.) Chrome is designed to make such applications run faster and more reliably, and to protect users and their computers in the process—in part, by separating the activity occurring on each open browser tab into its own process, as if it were a separate program. (As McCloud explains, current browsers like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox attend to the scripts running in each tab one at a time, moving between them serially—which is why the more tabs you have open, the slower your browser gets.)

I won’t go into the real details—plenty of other bloggers and journalists have done that this week. What’s amazing about McCloud’s Web comic is that he’s able to distill some fairly high-level points about things like multi-process architecture, memory fragmentation, rendering engines, virtual machines, hidden class transitions in Javascript, and incremental garbage collection into a few panels in a comic, and make it all feel fun and non-threatening. Take it from a longtime technology writer: explaining a new technology’s significance while getting the details right and keeping it all accessible to your Aunt Mae is a difficult feat. But a lot of us tech journalists could take lessons from McCloud, who doesn’t bring in a concept unless he can clarify through a clever combination of graphics, iconography, and text.

So, a lot of what I’m saying here boils down to one craftsman admiring another. Envying, even: the comic medium gives McCloud access to a lot of visual devices and idioms that are denied to us lowly copywriters. One of McCloud’s frequent tricks is to make the Google engineers part of the very diagrams he uses to explain Chrome’s new features. Every time you open a blank tab, for example, Chrome populates it with small, clickable tiles representing your most-visited Web pages (the program figures that you were probably on your way to one of those pages anyway). To explain what’s happening on this page, McCloud puts a couple of Googlers inside the tiles, not unlike those washed-up actors who used to appear on Hollywood Squares. In other places, the Google guides are climbing around on flow-chart boxes or perched on the borders of the comic’s panels.

Given how long McCloud has been working on various forms of Web comics and how popular his books have been, it’s odd that his example hasn’t caught on more widely. It’s true that traditional comic publishers like Marvel are finally using Flash and other Web-based technologies to put their classic superhero comics online. And in the non-Web world, comics and graphic novels are still in the midst of a renaissance that’s been underway for more than a decade now, even crossing over into film (e.g., 2003’s American Splendor, based on the comic books of Harvey Pekar). But I don’t have the sense that many comic artists are creating the kinds of new Web-based experiences McCloud was hoping they would back in 2000-20001, when he published “I Can’t Stop Thinking,” a series of Web comics that continued the themes in Reinventing Comics—especially, his speculations about the future of digital comics.

In one great strip from “I Can’t Stop Thinking,” for example, McCloud examined how the endlessly scrolling nature of a Web page—he called it the “infinite canvas”—might allow comic artists to play with reader’s expectations about the sequential nature of comics, perhaps by connecting panels via unconventional types of lines, links, paths, or trails. The Right Number used a unique zooming interface to get from one panel to the next—and this idea has found an unlikely reincarnation in the form of Seadragon, an experimental Microsoft program that uses zooming to ease the navigation of massive amounts of graphical information. But while software engineers and information architects may be busy experimenting in these directions, I’m not aware of a lot of artists who are.

Perhaps Web comics aren’t flowering (outside of McCloud’s opus) because drawing well is simply harder than writing well. Or perhaps it’s because we still equate comics with Superman and Batman. But a blogger at the Dublin, Ireland, Web design company iQ Content noted this week that the usual association between comics and low-brow superhero stories is a Western thing. “In some cultures, notably Japan, comics (or Manga) are not only an accepted form of entertainment for people of all ages, they are used as product instruction manuals and even on government tax forms,” iQ Content senior analyst John Wood wrote. That sounds pretty smart to me. There are some cases where you just have to RTFM, as they say—and I think we’d all be happier if the M stood for Manga.

Not everyone is enchanted by the McCloud comic. It has already inspired a savage (but amusing) parody over at the website of Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine, which argues that the comic simply panders to Google’s geeky constituents, and that some software concepts are so arcane that they don’t lend themselves well to illustrations. And there have been a few complaints that at 38 pages, McCloud’s comic is too long. But I’m with Wood, who writes, “Personally, I’d rather wade through a 30+ page comic than 15 pages of technical detail, randomly salted with marketing bumpf.”

In short, the comic leaves a stronger, clearer impression than any writeup could have. Now we get to see whether Chrome is really as shiny as it seems in McCloud’s drawings.

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If you want to search the Internet, you’ll probably use your PC rather than your cell phone. But that’s likely to change in the future, I was told the other night at this month’s Mobile Monday Boston event, which focused on how to make better Web browsers for mobile devices.

This month’s venue was Orange Labs’ fanatically style-conscious (blond plywood paneling, giant screens projecting changing pictures of clouds, long-legged aluminum Emeco chairs) office space in Cambridge. Mobile Monday originated in Finland eight years ago; today events are organized more or less all over the world, for people working in the mobile industry or interested in mobile communications.

According to the organizers, shipments of devices with advanced mobile browsers will grow from 76 million to 700 million per year over the next five years. Already today, most reasonably advanced phones have some kind of Internet browsing capability.

One of the speakers at the event was Franklin Davis from Nokia. He pointed out that with a global population of six billion people, and roughly three billion cell phones in use around the world but only one billion PCs, “the mobile will be the first and dominant way to access the Web in the future.”

In fact, in many places in the developing world, it already dominates. “Nobody has a PC, everybody has a mobile,” as Davis put it.

Getting a decent Web browser on these phones would not only help consumers—it would also make life a little easier for people who are developing screensavers, wallpapers, animations and similar content for mobile phones. Instead of making developers tweak the content to work on different handset models, with different screen sizes, different amounts of memory, et cetera, it should be possible to let the browser do the work. That might mean developers could build new applications faster.

Still, the majority of cell phone owners never bother to use their browsers at all. Part of the problem is that downloading big files takes a while over most mobile networks, and looking at an ordinary Web page filled with flashy graphics on a mobile phone’s tiny screen can be less than rewarding.

“It is like looking at your PC through a paper towel tube. You’ll never want a giant screen in your pocket,” said Davis.

Developers have tried different solutions for this problem. One is to build browsers that automatically discard the less essential parts of a Web page and trim it down to a leaner version. But users and their browsers might not always agree on what parts of a page aren’t essential.

A better solution might be to make sure that the user gets the right content with the minimum amount of fuzz. That could mean, for example, making the browser location-aware, according to David Carson, technical lead for the Android browser at Google. You shouldn’t have to enter a street address to search for the closest pizzerias, when the cellular network already tracks where you are.

This might also mean adding a voice user interface to the browser, said Mike Phillips, cofounder of speech technology developer Vlingo. In other words, just say “pizza”, and your phone will show you the way. Vlingo already makes this possible—or something close to it—with the voice-search application it has developed for Blackberry devices.

Who knows? Eventually you might be able to simply say “hungry” to your location-, time-, and context-conscious browser and have it lead you to a lobster shack if you’re driving on the Maine coast or to a bistro if you’re walking the streets of Paris.

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