Layoffs are cropping up all over the tech industry, with workers at companies ranging from AOL to Adobe to Microsoft getting pink slips. But while most people know to turn to the big online job boards and social networks ranging from LinkedIn to Facebook to help land a new gig, there are a lot of off-the-beaten-track online paths that can be taken as well. Below are 12 proven tech job search resources that you may not be using yet. Good luck!

TwitterJobSearch searches Twitter for posts on who is hiring. The posted jobs range from full-time to part-time work-at-home to one-off hired gun positions. Many of the positions listed are tech jobs, and the number of posts is at critical mass, with Twitter being the social phenomenon that it is. More than 410,000 new jobs were posted to TwitterJobSearch in the last 30 days. Use this syntax to, say, find web development jobs in San Francisco: “web developer San Francisco.”

oDesk is one of the largest online staffing marketplaces for people with tech skills. Developers, designers and many other tech types can post their resumes, examples of projects they’ve completed, and more, and get bids and offers from employers around the world for full- and part-time jobs. Find out more in WebWorkerDaily’s interview with oDesk CEO Gary Swart.

Do you have IT skills? ComputerJobs.com has listings from all over the U.S. if you do.

Elance is a very popular job bidding site for developers and programmers, and for people with other types of tech skills. Copywriters, illustrators and those with lots of other non-tech skills may also want to fill out a profile there. Check out more here.

Rent-a-Coder offers a very diverse collection of software development and programming jobs from employers all around the world. You can get very temporary jobs or full-time gigs.

Want a tech job search site with a name you can take very literally? Try FindaTechJob.com.  It lists lots of positions for programmers and web developers, among others. You can also connect your programming skills up with businesses at ScriptLance.

For web projects in particular, put in bids showing off your skills out at Webmaster Projects.

Open Source Skills?
With record funding rolling in for commercial open-source companies and more foundations overseeing projects, there are more paying jobs in the open source software world than ever.  Open source skills can also differentiate you from the tech worker pack, and many other tech workers don’t think of the world of open source as having commercial arms.

Several of the prominent open-source software foundations can help open sourcers find work. You might start by looking into the Apache Software Foundation , which oversees many open source projects, and the Drupal Foundation’s list of available jobs.

Don’t forget about the ongoing jobs available at prominent open source companies, as well as those that make extensive use of open source. Red Hat always has many jobs available, but you can also find many open source-focused positions at big Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo.

SmartData Enterprises specializes in placing outsourced open source workers on projects. You can work remotely on projects taking place all around the world, for pay.

For many useful tips on how to effectively use social networks to land a job, see WebWorkerDaily’s popular resource collection — and make sure to stay organized.

You’ve gotta hand it to Google: The company is never shy about throwing the proverbial spaghetti against the wall to see if it will stick. Over the years, it’s introduced countless projects that have gone through long beta cycles only to fail miserably — or achieve a degree of success far below what was expected. Google Docs, for example, was supposed to topple Microsoft Office, and is still predicted to do so, but if that ever happened, I missed it.

Next year, Google will introduce one of its most ambitious projects yet: Chrome OS (GigaOm Pro, subscription req’d). There are quite a few misconceptions going around about the new operating system, among them that it’s aimed squarely at Microsoft’s operating system hegemony. It’s not. Chrome OS is targeting netbooks, not desktop and server systems. Still, the operating system includes some bold gambles from Google. Here are four of them.

Return of the thin client. Take a look at this CNet news story, which reports that  “Oracle’s Larry Ellison today resurrected the company that designs a scaled-down desktop system — known generically as the network computer — and announced plans to ship new models in the first quarter of next year.” But note the date: 1999, not 2009. Indeed, Ellison was championing thin clients — computers with few local hardware resources that would get applications and data out on a network — back in the late 1990s.

It was an idea that was subsequently tried many times, and failed. Yet fast-forward to today, and Google’s Chrome OS is placing the very same bet. As company officials noted yesterday: “In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. Users don’t have to install applications. All data in Chrome OS is in the cloud.” Chrome OS netbooks will be thin clients.

All data in the cloud? Many of the smartest people predicting the future of cloud computing are noting that companies want to deploy hybrid public and private cloud applications, namely because they don’t want to have all of their data on a remote network, with little control over it and the potential for lock-in and losses. However, Google’s Chrome OS is a bet that consumer and business netbook buyers will be perfectly happy to trust everything to the cloud. There won’t even be hard disks on Chrome OS netbooks — only solid-state drives. Will users accept such an absolutist model?

Poof goes the OS. Chrome OS is architecturally very different from other operating systems, bypassing many types of boot processes and others in order to optimize performance. Additionally, however, the OS will actually reimage itself if malware is detected. If Google pulls this off, Chrome OS systems may be free of the guaranteed performance decay that Windows systems tend to have over time. Still, users may be wary about an operating system that’s ready to exit stage left at any given moment.

Drivers? Support? Fuhgeddaboudit. Have you ever called Google for Google Docs support? I haven’t either, even though I use the applications. When you release an operating system, though, if it reaches a large audience, that audience is going to want support. Just ask Microsoft, which spent years trying to effectively support and patch Windows Vista.

In addition to excellent support, which I don’t think of as Google’s specialty, users of Chrome OS are going to want their netbooks to work seamlessly and instantly with their printers, digital cameras, smartphones and more. Chrome OS isn’t being built from scratch. It’s Linux-based (the Ubuntu team at Canonical has been helping it take shape), so Google can get a headstart by incorporating existing driver libraries and the like.  But Microsoft spent years trying to catch up to Apple in terms of automatic hardware detection and installation with its Plug-and-Play initiative, and Apple users will tell you that it never quite succeeded. Is Google about to find out what a huge headache it can be to support an operating system? History argues that will be the case.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Chrome OS will be one of the most interesting tech stories to watch next year. In many ways, though, it’s a Hail Mary.

Air Canada is testing an in-flight Wi-Fi service from Aircell on its flights between Toronto and Los Angeles and Montreal and L.A. From now until Jan. 29, passengers can plunk down $9.95 per flight to surf on a laptop and $7.95 to access the Internet on smaller devices such as a smartphone or WiFi-enabled media players like the iPod touch. AirCell also provides its GoGo in-air Wi-Fi service on Delta and American Airlines flights in the U.S.

And because Aircell currently only has regulatory approval and the antenna coverage that enables airlines to offer Wi-Fi in the U.S., Air Canada passengers can only get their Wi-Fi fix when flying over U.S. soil. Perhaps that accounts for the slight discount on Air Canada’s prices for Wi-Fi when compared to American’s charge of $12.95 for in-flight access.

BitTorrent after The Pirate Bay: Do you still need trackers? (NewTeeVee)
3 next-gen applications for Smart Grid 2.0 (Earth2Tech)
Microsoft’s bad image should be a warning to Apple (TheAppleBlog)
4 open-source file shredders that delete data forever (OStatic)
How to get a Magic Mouse to touch-scroll in Windows (jkOnTheRun)
Finding web worker gear deals on Black Friday (WebWorkerDaily)

Twitter COO Dick Costolo, speaking today on a panel at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp event in San Francisco, shed some light into the micromessaging service’s revenue plans, promising that it will begin taking a cut of its partners’ advertising revenues “early next year.” Meanwhile, it will “foster mechanisms that allow partners to do more sophisticated things” with its APIs. Twitter also plans to offer commercial accounts that contain premium features like analytics dashboards and multiple authors, according to Costolo.

Achieving the seemingly impossible task of building up more hype about Twitter’s business model, Costolo promised Twitter’s advertising will be “fascinating,” “non-traditional” and “really cool.” Some partners already pay Twitter to use certain parts of its APIs, he added, though Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur noted from the audience that his company does not.

Costolo emphasized that Twitter will continue to offer free access to users and partners, and that small startups who start building on Twitter’s APIs won’t be expected to pay up front.

The Windows 7 trumpets are blasting with gusto, with Steve Felice, president of the small and medium-sized business (SMB) division of Dell, claiming that Microsoft’s new operating system is fueling a surge in demand for PCs, according to Computerworld.  “As soon as Oct. 22 hit, both our consumer business and our SMB business had a very healthy increase in demand,” Felice is quoted as saying. Meanwhile, David Coursey reports that with Vista on the sidelines and a well-reviewed new OS, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer “has a new ‘f’ word” to describe Windows: ‘Fantastic.’”

These comments fall in line with recent lofty predictions from Dell founder Michael Dell about Windows 7 driving the PC market forward. But is that, in fact, true? Moreover, is it not still too early to measure the operating system’s success?

At a Churchill Club event that I attended in Silicon Valley in October, Michael Dell said that many businesses were running Windows XP, which is eight years old, and that Windows 7 would usher in a major upgrade cycle. The fact that Dell just missed profit estimates amidst declining market share has nothing to do with Windows 7, of course, but there are some signs that a truly major upgrade cycle toward the OS hasn’t yet happened.

While research shows that Vista users are upgrading to Windows 7, keep in mind that Vista has only 30 percent market share after several years in the wild. Windows 7 is not replacing the huge installed base of Windows XP at anywhere near the rate that it’s replacing Vista.

The Wall Street Journal estimates that some 30-40 million copies of Windows 7 have sold since its October release, and most estimates put the operating system’s market share at about 4 percent. These numbers are nothing to shake a stick at (GigaOm Pro, subscription req’d), and I agree with Michael Dell that Windows 7 will spark a major upgrade cycle — eventually.

In the meantime, however, we are in a period of relative limbo in the PC buying cycle. Holiday shopping hasn’t taken off yet, and, for safety reasons, businesses tend to wait and watch whenever a brand-new version of Windows is released before implementing widespread adoption.  Hardware incompatibilities, driver issues and many more things get resolved in an operating system’s first months, prompting many businesses to sit on the sidelines.

Historically, January has a much higher PC-buying profile than October and November do, and by that point holiday shopping numbers for Windows 7 will have started to roll in. Indeed, it will take a few months before we have truly accurate numbers for Windows 7 adoption, but I don’t doubt that it will eventually spark an upgrade cycle that — love or hate Microsoft — will benefit the tech industry.

Updated: Infoaxe is revealing to the world today its alter ego: a search engine. Unlike other real-time search engines such as OneRiot, Infoaxe doesn’t depend on Twitter streams and the like (Update: OneRiot emailed to note that it also uses a panel in addition to social sharing streams). Instead, it anonymously harvests data from its millions (low millions, for now) of people who use its personal search history plug-in.

The idea is to observe every page an Infoaxe user visits, not just the ones they share on social web services. This aggregate attention data adds 7 million URLs per day to its index, as compared to some 300,000 URLs on Twitter and 10,000 on Digg. Of course, those other sites’ URLs are shared for a reason.

“Even though Twitter and Facebook have exposed the chink in Google’s armor, we don’t think they are the cure,” Infoaxe founder Jonathan Siddharth said in a recent interview. He and co-founder Vijay Krishnan met while doing their computer science masters’ degrees at Stanford a couple years ago.

Infoaxe’s results are fresh, but they don’t form an up-to-the-second real-time stream, which is a plus for relevancy. Rather Infoaxe puts an emphasis on pages where its users have stayed for a while or revisited often — so it’s good at discovering things like product deals and hosted web streams of TV and movies — the kinds of query for which another search engine might deliver an outdated pile of spammy SEO junk, or a more timeless link like an IMBD page, respectively.

As Infoaxe tries to secure deals to incorporate its results into larger search engines, it’ll be important that it has a good sample of users. And to some extent, that will never happen, because the people who contribute to Infoaxe will only be those who are motivated to save and parse their own search histories. However Siddharth and Krishnan brag that their 2.1 million registered users are starting to break out of the early adopter mold, with more total IE plug-in downloads than Firefox, and an even balance of men and women.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Infoaxe has five employees; it raised $900,000 from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Labrador Ventures, Band of Angels and Amidzad Partners in 2008.

Nokia said today it’s slashing 330 research and development jobs in Europe as it looks to consolidate its handset lineup and focus on high-end smartphones. The move is a small one and long overdue, but it is a step toward getting Nokia back in the game.

The Finnish company’s success selling low- to mid-range smartphones in developing markets is well documented, but Nokia continues to lose ground in the U.S. and Europe as superphones from Apple and Research In Motion chip away at its market share. And Nokia is increasingly threatened by Android, which has gained sudden momentum in the wake of its Verizon Wireless Droid initiative.

Nokia may feel a pinch as it severs the R&D personnel, but the company will surely continue to innovate with its Maemo OS and S60 devices.  And it’s not like innovation has ever been a problem for Nokia — its struggles since the emergence of the iPhone have stemmed from its aging Symbian platform, its unwillingness to bow to U.S. carriers and an utter lack of affordable, iconic devices. Shifting its focus toward higher-end handsets that produce better margins will be a step in the right direction.

The New York City Council is voting on a resolution this morning supporting the idea that Internet service providers cannot discriminate against web traffic on their networks. As gestures go, this resolution supporting net neutrality is more symbolic than it is useful, and to that end has already yielded a couple of photos of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg shaking hands and looking concerned about the future of NYC broadband.

However, New York City is a nice case study for competitive broadband, so I hope Genachowski took notes while he was there. Verizon,  Time Warner Cable and  Cablevision all serve the city (although they don’t all compete head to head in every block), so some residents there have access to both fiber to the home and cable’s wideband service using DOCSIS 3.0. Our own Ryan Lawler, who lives in Harlem, is paying $33 a month for Internet service from Time Warner Cable, which currently has the monopoly in his building. However, he says he just got a note informing him that Verizon FiOS will also soon be available, so we’ll see what happens to his cable speeds (which are currently 9 Mbps down and 500 kilobits per second up) and service in the next few months.

The state’s CIOwants to collect real data on broadband penetration and speeds so that it can get a sense of customers’ level of satisfaction with their service as opposed to just knowing which areas have broadband and which don’t. A Congressman from the state is also attempting to pass legislation that would give the FCC the power to regulate certain aspects of net neutrality and broadband access. So given the competition, better data collection and consumer-friendly legislative efforts, I hope Genachowski is doing some learning, not just politicking for a symbolic victory on net neutrality.

In my first week back on the web beat at GigaOM, one of the topics I wanted to focus on was location. Let’s just say that hasn’t exactly been a difficult task. Coming at us from Boulder, San Francisco and London, here are today’s top three geo-tagging developments:

SimpleGeo launched today, promising to build a contextual infrastructure of points and eventually polygons for the world so that people can build apps that incorporate where users are located. The company says it’s already received 600 beta inquiries in its first day out, and it also received both audience and judges’ choice accolades at the Under the Radar event where it debuted.

“We’re selling shovels at the beginning of a gold rush,” is how co-founder Matt Galligan put it on a call today. “You want to add location, just come to us — it’s done.” Though four-person SimpleGeo still measures its age in months, it already has a price sheet: free, $399/month for small businesses and $2,499/month for custom implementations. Galligan said he expects to announce a funding round soon. (BTW, this follows the launch of competitor PublicEarth, which calls itself “the wiki for places,” yesterday.)

While Boulder, Colo.-based SimpleGeo may have moved quickly in its short life, big social sites aren’t necessarily waiting for little startups to come fill their location-based needs. Today Twitter launched a geotagging API, at first only available as an opt-in feature for outside apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid and Twittelator Pro. When used, this feature associates a tweeter’s exact location (as best as it can be determined) at the time of tweeting with the tweet itslf.

And lastly, Ambient Industries debuted a social location app for the iPhone today called Flook. While there’s no lack of competition for fun iPhone apps that enable users to mark up the world, Flook is built to be quirky, easy to browse and contextual-ad ready. The basic interface consists of virtual geo-tagged “cards” with facts, photos and recommendations left at particular locations by Flook users. Users can swipe through cards and turn them over to leave comments in a jaunty orange and purple interface manned by cute little robots (see video demo above).

What’s interesting is that Flook comes from two Symbian founders, Roger Nolan and Jane Sales. Said Nolan on a call from London today, “Apple seemed to just do all the things that Symbian and Nokia should have done for a long time.” So he and Sales (they’re married) along with two other co-founders raised $1 million 1 million pounds ($1.65 million) from Eden Ventures and Amadeus Capital and founded Ambient a year ago. Flook is the company’s first project.

With Azure, Microsoft is trying to strike a balance between giving customers the ease of a platform as a service and the customization that power users need to build tailored applications — both in-house and in the public Azure cloud. In the wake of the Redmond giant’s developer conference, where it detailed more of its plans, it became clear that Azure is striving to be a general purpose cloud offering for enterprises that doesn’t make developers sweat the small stuff or compromise on bigger things.

If we compare it to infrastructure-as-a-service providers such as Amazon’s Ec2 or Rackspace’s CloudServers products, Azure attempts to handle more of the actual management and provisioning of virtual machines for a user. The biggest issue the target customer faces isn’t the hardware cost but the expense of managing an application on the hardware, Amitabh Srivastava, senior vice president at Microsoft with responsibility for Windows Azure, told me. So the goal was to allow Azure to run so developers don’t think about the underlying hardware as they might on a pure IaaS product.

This is where the idea of Azure as Microsoft’s OS for the cloud comes in. Azure is a platform-as-a-services play that seeks to leverage what Microsoft has learned through its OS dominance. First, it’s playing nice. Microsoft ensures that developers can use a wide variety of  programming languages to build on Azure such as PHP, Eclipse and Java, which is pretty unique among platforms. Earlier this year, I spoke with Microsoft about its plans for Azure and came away with the clear sense that the company’s programs and .Net would really shine on Azure, even though other programming languages would also work. Now I get the sense that Microsoft is working hard to emphasize how suitable Azure is for programs built using a variety of languages, even those that have no ties to Redmond.

Second, Microsoft is hoping Azure can play on many machines. If we view the data center as akin to a machine, Microsoft wants folks to be able to create applications that can run on a Microsoft Azure cloud or internally on an in-house cloud. Newly launched AppFabric is the solution for that. AppFabric is software that folks can run in their own data center to create an internal cloud that can talk to and share information with the public Azure cloud if the client wants. Rackspace and IBM are both attempting to build these types of bridges between internal and their external clouds.

Finally, Microsoft is trying to keep its own offerings separate. Instead of bundling Microsoft products with Azure, Srivastava outlined a software-as-a-services strategy that will offer customers Microsoft Exchange on Azure or SharePoint on Azure as a service. This may explain why some offerings such as SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services, announced last year, are now divorced and missing from the Azure announcement this year.  However, competing software can be offered on Azure as well.

Larry Augustin, CEO of Sugar CRM, has chosen to offer customers the ability to host Sugar CRM on Azure, and says the platform was easy to build on, even though SugarCRM is built using PHP. He also mentioned that Microsoft’s database offerings were more complete than the newly launched Amazon Relational Database Service, and offered me a possible model for future clouds. In his vision, customers will be able to choose which clouds their software as a service are hosted on. This is the polar opposite of the vision espoused by SugarCRM’s biggest rival, Salesforce.com, which hosts its software on its own cloud. But the power of the modular and open approach is hard to deny, and Microsoft is smart to embrace that.

Perhaps no other digital music company this side of Apple has made the transition to the mobile sphere as seamlessly as Pandora, the Internet radio company that was fighting for its life as late as of this past summer before a royalty agreement stabilized its future. I chatted with CTO Tom Conrad this afternoon, and he shared a few stats that showed just how significant mobile uptake has been in the company’s growth — particularly in introducing the service to new users rather than converting desktop listeners to mobile ones.

Fully half of the company’s first-time users are now signing up via mobile devices, he told me, and since Pandora arrived on the iPhone in July 2008, 9 million people have created new accounts on smartphones, including iPhones, BlackBerrys, Palm and Android phones. That’s 24 percent of Pandora’s total user base, which is currently at 38 million and growing. Pandora has been installed on 13 million smartphones to date, meaning that about 70 percent of its smartphone users didn’t have desktop accounts previously.

Moreover, a quarter of the music streamed on Pandora currently goes to mobile listeners, and 25 percent of the songs bought by users clicking through to the iTunes or Amazon MP3 stores are acquired via mobile devices, suggesting a real movement toward mobile usage rather than just experimentation. New market research from Ando Media (PDF) suggests that Pandora is by several measures the most popular Internet radio provider in the U.S., even without the mobile listenership included. And while mobile ads don’t deliver as much revenue as desktop display ads do, Pandora’s extraordinarily popular mobile apps are surely familiarizing new users with its brand name — and driving them back to the desktop as well.

As AOL lays off a third of its work force as it prepares to go independent, it’s looking to drop its ICQ and MapQuest units, according to reports by Kara Swisher. But with the deluge of information hitting web users these days, location and presence are two of the most promising ways to parse the online world (GigaOM Pro sub. required). They’re also two of the most innovation-rich veins of the last year, with projectile growth of mobile location apps and the ongoing real-time status arms race. While AOL is busy revising itself to be about content and advertising, both of those areas of focus benefit greatly from context and relevance.

ICQ was long ago eclipsed by other instant-messaging services (AOL’s AIM among them) and the last person to prefer MapQuest over the competition was probably Andy Samberg in “Lazy Sunday,” but those services are hardly tiny. MapQuest alone accounted for more than 40 percent of AOL’s U.S. search queries in October. ICQ reportedly has 40 million to 50 million unique monthly visitors and still leads the market in countries like Germany, Russia, Ukraine and Israel.

Given the overlap, it’s understandable that AOL no longer needs ICQ as much as it once did, but a sale of MapQuest is pretty strange — though AOL might be able to get a decent price for the unit out of Apple, which clearly would be happy to wean its mobile self off of Google and its Maps.

AOL paid $287 million plus earnouts for ICQ in 1998 and $1.1 billion for MapQuest in 1999. The soon-to-be-spinoff itself is also possibly thinking about getting rid of recent acquisition Bebo, cause, you know, social networking’s another boring sector these days.

Text messages and banners on the mobile web are the most noticeable kinds of wireless ads, according to new research from Parks Associates, but mobile video and click-to-call campaigns draw the best response from consumers. Such contradictions underscore why advertisers need to use a variety of tools as they deploy their mobile campaigns.

Text-only ads generated the highest recall rates of 11 types of mobile come-ons, with 49 percent of respondents saying they noticed such pitches all or some of the time, the market research firm said during a webcast today. Ads at the top of a mobile web page were the second-most noticeable, with 45 percent of users recalling them. Click-to-call ads fared worst, with 27 percent of people noticing them, and movie trailers were recalled by only 31 percent.

Fascinatingly, though, the least-noticed ads drew the highest response rates in Parks’ study. Movie trailers drew a 38 percent response rate, outperforming all other ad types, while 35 percent responded to click-to-call campaigns. Meanwhile, text-only ads managed to draw responses from only 26 percent of users, and ads atop web pages generated a 30 percent response rate.

Parks’ figures highlight why advertisers need to have a wide assortment of weapons in the mobile arsenal as they try to target users via their phones. Nearly every phone on the market supports text, allowing advertisers to potentially reach broad swaths of mainstream users via SMS (GigaOM Pro, sub. required), for instance, but advertisers also have a chance to engage tech-savvy consumers via mobile video and to encourage would-be customers to call them directly with click-to-call ads.

Mobile advertising has long underperformed amid excessive hype, and the space will continue to endure growing pains over the next several years. But Parks predicts the North American market is poised to take off as the economy recovers, exploding to $1.5 billion in 2013 from $208 million this year. For those figures to become reality, though, advertisers will need to employ a number of tactics — and pick the right ones based on what they’re trying to sell and who they’re trying to reach.

Though there’s no lack of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, you can count one more. Maveron this week announced it is opening a San Francisco office, headed by partner Amy Errett, the former CEO of Olivia.com who joined Maveron as an entrepreneur in residence two years ago.

Errett (a fly-fishing enthusiast, as pictured) told us that Maveron differentiates itself because it will only fund consumer-focused businesses, and it spans the range of seed to late-stage investments. With portfolio companies such as kids’ browser KidZui, language education site Livemocha and online college enabler Altius Education, Errett said her two main areas of focus are “web-enabled consumer services — classically things consumers did offline — and online education.”

Some areas she’d like to invest in: social shopping (where Maveron is already incubating a company), virtual goods and currency, disintermediation of markets (Errett was formerly an executive at Etrade), real estate, autos, classifieds — basically, any business usually conducted offline that can become more efficient online. How does that thesis apply to the venture business? Errett said she expects venture to become more efficient, too, but that Maveron’s close relationships with its companies through all the stages of their business will pull it through.

Chrome OS is a natural evolution of the work that’s been done on the Chrome browser, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos said when they unveiled it at Google’s Mountain View campus on Thursday. The operating system is designed to imbue web applications with the “full functionality of desktop applications.” As for the reasons behind the development of the new platform, they pointed to rapid growth in the netbook market — where Chrome OS is aimed — and cloud computing.

Goals

With Chrome OS, Google had three goals, according to Pichai: speed, simplicity and security. ”Chrome on Chrome OS will be even faster than Chrome [the existing browser],” he noted. “In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. Users don’t have to install applications. All data in Chrome OS is in the cloud. If a user loses a Chrome OS machine, the user should be able to log back into the cloud and retrieve cached data.” Pichai also demonstrated that Chrome OS loads in only a few seconds.

The demonstrations made clear that the OS relies heavily on “panels,” pop-up windows housing web-based applications that are similar to multiple open windows in a browser.  Papakipos, meanwhile, characterized the security model in Chrome OS as very much like the one in the Chrome browser, and unlike the one in standard operating systems: If malware is detected, all cached data is saved; Chrome OS is subsequently re-downloaded, then freshly imaged on a machine. If an application crashes in a tab, only that tab goes down.

Coming to Devices Next Year

The target date for delivery of Chrome OS machines is the end of next year. Google is working with hardware partners to bring Chrome OS to market, Pichai said, and doing so in unusual ways. Chrome OS is not aimed at hard disk-enabled machines, for example, but rather at systems with solid-state drives. Google is also working with hardware vendors on what Pichai described as “slightly larger netbooks,” with full-sized keyboards and large displays. All the open source code is available today, as are all the design documents, said Papakipos.  You can find the source code for the OS and other links here.

So does Chrome OS have a fighting chance in the hot netbook market that it’s squarely aimed at, given that it won’t make its debut on devices until late next year? Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM processors, which as jkOnTheRun has noted, will give it a broad spectrum of coverage on devices, and could make it a significant player in the emerging ARM-based smartbook hardware category. Still, the OS will significantly trail the arrival of Microsoft’s Windows 7, which is also squarely aimed at netbooks.

Even though netbooks have already been exploring new low-priced territory for portable computers, Chrome OS-based netbooks could also take prices much lower. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in July that “we do not plan to charge for it, in an open source form,” but that “there may be other ways we can make money from it.” He added that:

“The rough argument is we do things that are strategic because they get people to ultimately use the Internet in a clever and new way. We know that if they use the Internet more, they search more, watch more on YouTube, and we then know that our advertising [will reach them]. We do not require each and every project to be completely profitable or not profitable — we look at them in a strategic context: are they making the web a better place?”

Could Google subsidize Chrome OS-based netbooks in an effort to attract users with low prices and feed them into its search-and-advertising ecosysytem? As is true for most of Google’s projects, feeding that lucrative ecosystem tends to be a high priority for the company. It will no doubt be one as Chrome OS makes its way into devices next year.