Sitting here at the Teens In Tech Conference as the lunch break winds down, I see white power cords everywhere, as the vast majority of attendees brought their Macs and the signature white power cords are snaking down to the ground go grab much-needed electricity for the full day event, which wraps at 5 pm. There are a handful of Ubuntu laptops and the random Windows machine here and there, but it's mostly Macs.

That said, I didn't bring power cords. The reason is because I brought the Chromebook, and if you've gotten used to a world where you have to constantly feel the anxiety of watching your battery to see how many hours/minutes you have left and what percentage you are charged, the elimination of that anxiety is serious relief.

+Matt Cutts is taking a 30-day challenge to only use his Chromebook, to the exclusion of all other laptops. I've already talked a lot about how I made the Samsung Chromebook my primary computer, and it's true. I still get my MacBook Air out every once in a while for Photoshop work, but that's happening less and less these days, as more of our content moves to the Web.

All I really need from my computer now is amazing battery life and always-on connectivity, and ChromeOS does exactly that. We're very new in this process, of course, so while there may be some shortcomings, think about the trajectory of both Android and iOS, and how those platforms are a lot more feature-rich and full of apps versus just a few years ago.

You know that feeling you get when you switch to an unfamiliar platform, and aren't comfortable knowing where things are or how shortcuts work? Do you know how you feel more comfortable in your space on your main machine in your favorite OS? It's like speaking English (or your native tongue) after the stress of being in a foreign language. Ditching the power cords and being fully on the Web gives me that same relief and it's energizing to know I'm not tethered, but instead, fully mobile. So if you have access to Chrome, bring it to your next event and feel the difference.


/via My Google+ Profile.

The world's best real-time and blog search engine doesn't belong to Google or Twitter. It now belongs to Meltwater Group, the SAAS company best known for its social media monitoring suite, as it now owns IceRocket.com, the under-appreciated but outstanding search tool I use multiple times daily, and recently recommended to Techipedia's readers looking for top tricks and tools. IceRocket, known by many folks mostly due to its being funded by Mark Cuban, has been working with Meltwater for a few years, and had previously provided data to other Meltwater acquisitions, including Jitterjam and Buzzgain (where I was an advisor).

Blake Rhodes, the one man band behind IceRocket, told me by email today that the service will continue to feed into these Meltwater properties, and will leverage both to make the service more robust, "hopefully getting more data in house, rather than relying on any 3rd parties," he said.

So why should you care? Because Icerocket quietly has built the most accurate, thorough and responsive real-time and blog search engine I have ever seen. I told everyone at the end of 2009 that they were tough to top and included them in my top ten list of sites I use every day at the end of 2010. You know me - I always go to the mat for services I think are the very best, and Icerocket is high quality. No other real-time search engine that I have tried gives me such comprehensive results in a lightweight format across as many properties as they do.

Rhodes will continue as an employee of Meltwater going forward as the company integrates its newest acquisition. I for one hope the site remains open and available, because to be honest, nobody else has got this nailed.

Disclosure: Theoretically, due to having advisor shares in BuzzGain, I am a Meltwater shareholder in some minor way which I have zero visibility into.

With hundreds of millions in the bank from the company's most recent venture round, and hundreds of new employees having "joined the flock" just in the last two years, Twitter is bursting at the seams with resources to help the company expand from its current position to playing an even greater role in tomorrow's social Web. Joining the company today to help find even more people to help with the creation, curation, distribution, discovery and storage of the world's 140 character missives is Marcus Thorpe, who goes by the moniker of @Talent_Sleuth.

Thorpe joins the company by way of a Skype, where he spent the last year, after a full five years at Google. Billing himself as an international staffing guru, Marcus helped build out Google's European offices and says he was the first member of the EMEA Engineering and Operations recruitment team for Google in Europe, when he worked for the search giant from June 2005 until September of last year. His LinkedIn profile suggests he had a hand in the recruiting of more than 800 European employees for Google over the five-year period.


After leaving Google last fall, he joined Skype, which was recently acquired by Microsoft for more than 8 billion, quite possibly making the role a bit less interesting than when it was a more scrappy independent company. Now he'll be making phone calls on behalf of Twitter. No idea if he prefers to use Skype to do his recruiting.

This afternoon, Google's SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond highlighted some of the many ways industry participants are ganging up on Android in reaction to its strong growth. In his post, he said "when (Microsoft and Apple) get into bed together you have to start wondering what's going on."

If you can reach all the way back to 1997, you can remember another time when Apple and Microsoft got in bed together... which led to Microsoft putting $150 million into Apple, and squashing an active lawsuit from Apple against Redmond. As a CNET article from the time argued:

"the real benefit for Microsoft is that it gains an ally against Sun Microsystems' Java programming language. "Apple has not been the bogeyman to Microsoft in a long time. They are more than happy to have a legitimate threat to their business, and it's called Java."

Of course, there is some irony to how Java now powers Android and that is central to Oracle's suit against Google as well (as they own Sun now)... but two big companies with divergent views will turn to each other to fight a more nimble competitor. Apple and Microsoft teaming up to buy patents is not exactly done with the end user in mind. We've seen this before...

BTW - Thank goodness CNET keeps its archives. I wish every media pub did this.