Now casting: Comedy Central, Nick and Sesame Street Go

Chromecast is adding seven more great apps to your casting queue. Get bigger laughs with The Daily Show on Comedy Central, learn with Elmo on Sesame Street Go, or cast Nickelodeon and let Spongebob keep your family entertained. And, no matter how far you travel this winter, stay connected with TuneIn for international radio stations and millions of podcasts. With EPIX, YuppTV and ENCORE Play also casting, you have a full lineup of shows, sports, games and movies to last throughout the holiday season.

Posted by Faisal Feroz, Partner Engineering Manager, Elmo’s best friend

Bookmarks get a new look and learn a few new tricks

We all know how hard it can be to find something once you've saved it. Starting today, it's a lot easier thanks to an update to bookmarks in the latest Chrome Beta. We’ll be rolling this feature gradually out over the next few weeks. Try out the new Bookmarks Manager by going to your Chrome Menu  > Bookmarks > Bookmarks Manager.

Now when you create a bookmark, you can select an image and add a note or snippet to help you find that bookmark more quickly later. Google will also suggest a folder if it seems like it could be a fit.

The new bookmarks get even better if you’re signed in to Chrome with sync enabled:

• Improved search: Quickly find that elusive page with search powered by Google, which looks not only at the bookmark title and snippet, but also the bookmarked page’s content. 
• Collect bookmarks by topic: Your bookmarks will automatically be organized by topic, like “Tokyo” and “Photography.” If you’d rather, you can still organize them into folders yourself.
• Familiar bookmarks, new look: Your existing bookmarks will automatically get updated with images and descriptions, wherever possible.
• Share: Have a folder of favorite bookmarks? You can make it public and share the link with whomever you’d like to access it. 
• Access your bookmarks anywhere: Bookmarked an article on your phone to finish reading on your laptop? Chrome will continue to sync your bookmarks across all of your devices, just like it does today. 

Adding, organizing, and browsing your bookmarks is now easier (and prettier) than ever before. Have any questions about your new bookmarks? Join the discussion here.

Posted by Cynthia Johanson, Product Manager and Super Star-rer

Walk in the footsteps of heroes in “A Journey Through Middle-earth”

In time for the epic conclusion to the Hobbit trilogy we’ve updated the Chrome Experiment, “A Journey Through Middle-earth.” Whether you’re a hobbit, wizard or dwarf (oh yeah, humans too) you can now relive all of the epic Middle-earth adventures, from Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring to Bilbo’s final battle in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in theaters December 17th. This year's Chrome Experiment was developed by North Kingdom in collaboration with Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures (MGM).

Your adventure starts on a beautiful, interactive map of Middle-earth where you can explore all 27 locations from the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit film trilogies. This year’s map is rich with 3D animations highlighting the paths of eight key characters, including Bilbo, Gandalf and Bard.

Completely new for this year’s version is a peer-to-peer battle game where you can challenge your friends to a test of skill. The peer-to-peer gameplay experience was built primarily using the latest web technologies, including WebRTC and WebGL. It’s touch optimized for laptops, phones and tablets, bringing you a stunning interactive experience across all your devices.

Just go to goo.gl/TheHobbit on your laptop, phone or tablet to check out the latest Chrome Experiment, “A Journey through Middle-earth.”

And for those of you who are more interested in geeking out about web development than exploring Middle-earth, check out our technical case study on HTML5Rocks.com.

Posted by Ian Ellison-Taylor, Chrome Product Manager and human defender of Minas Tirith

Introducing fun family games for Chromecast

Over the past year Chromecast has added hundreds of your favorite apps, and brought anything on the web to the TV via Android mirroring and Chrome tab casting. Just in time for the holidays, we’re adding even more apps to the list. So whether you’re looking forward to a quiet evening watching your favorite holiday heartwarmer or a rousing game night with the gang, there’s something for everyone.

Family-friendly games for Chromecast

Chromecast uses your phone or tablet as the controller and your TV screen like a game or score board to let you play games like Wheel of Fortune or classics like Hasbro’s Monopoly Dash, Scrabble Blitz, Connect Four Quads and Simon Swipe on your big screen.

If you prefer to dance around, check out Just Dance Now. Your smartphone can tell if you’re fist pumping high or shaking your hands down low, which earns you points. To show off your mental moves instead, Big Web Quiz and Emoji Party for Chromecast bring trivia to the TV. Astound your friends with your answers to questions like: How many goats tall is Taylor Swift? What does the "Queen of Hearts" look like in emoji? Big Web Quiz uses Google Knowledge Graph to create hundreds of questions, while Emoji Party uses your knowledge of emojis to guess movie titles based on the pictures.

There's no hassle or expense with extra controllers. Anyone with a phone or tablet can join in on any of these games, so download these apps from the Play Store or App Store so all your family and friends can shake it, show off their smarts or just play.

More movies and shows with Showtime Anytime and Starz

Nothing says winter like a TV binge on a cold, gray day. With Showtime Anytime you can catch up on past and current seasons of the network’s original series including Homeland and The Affair. With Starz Play, get your tartan on with the first season of Outlander, or have a marathon of Friday night flicks.

Easily explore and discover new things to cast 

To make it easier for you to navigate through the many great apps available with Chromecast and find exactly what you’d like to cast, we’ve added category tabs to the chromecast.com/apps page. Choose from TV & Movies, Music & Audio, Games, Sports, Photos & Video, or More.

Posted by Wendi Zhang, three-peat Scrabble champ