Ina Fried

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More Intel Chromebooks Coming From Acer, Toshiba, HP and Asus

Asus and Toshiba are joining the Chrome OS fray, with Intel announcing on Wednesday a fresh crop of laptops and desktops running the Google operating system.

HP and Acer are also doing new Chromebooks based on Intel’s Haswell chip, which offers significantly better battery life than past Intel chips.

Google said that 5,000 schools have started using Chromebooks, representing 20 percent of U.S. school districts. It also cites NPD stats that show Chromebooks making up roughly a quarter of the sub-$300 computer market.

Google’s Sundar Pichai appeared onstage at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, touting the new models.

“I think they will be hugely disruptive,” Pichai said.

He also thanked Intel for its support of both Android and Chrome OS.

“We are seeing amazing momentum across both platforms,” Pichai said, noting that Google is activating more than 1.5 million Android devices per day, recently crossed the 1 billion activation mark and briefly mentioned the upcoming KitKat release of Android.

Earlier on Wednesday, Intel talked up the ability of Windows computers to hit new price points, promising that its new Bay Trail processors will pave the way for laptops as low as $199, touch laptops as low as $299, and tablet/laptop convertible machines starting at $349. Microsoft executive VP Tami Reller also spoke at the Intel Developer Forum, saying that the company saw a record number of Windows 8 units activated in August, suggesting that a back-to-school bump could finally be lifting the market.

Separately, Intel showed off a reference design for future Ultrabooks that will incorporate a 3-D camera, a la Microsoft’s Kinect.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald