Google I/O Day 1 Distilled – WebM and Google Wave

Google I/O certainly keeps things busy at this time of the year. We get inundated with keynote videos and new announcements of exciting new products. It’s a big deal – 5000 people from 66 countries will listen to 200 speakers. It certainly sounds like it’ll be the biggest concentration of smart phones on the planet. Furthermore, many people are live blogging from I/O itself (super-googler Matt Cutts is even ‘live waving.’) So here is a brief run-down of the top stories that caught our eye.

WebM

This has the feeling of a potential game-changer. Google is basically taking the VP8 video codec and making it open source – WebM is the new media file format. The WebM project blog has an interesting way of looking at it:

“A key factor in the web’s success is that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. are open and freely implementable. Though video is also now core to the web experience, there is unfortunately no open and free video format that is on par with the leading commercial choices. To that end, we are excited to introduce WebM, a broadly-backed community effort to develop a world-class media format for the open web.”

The bottom line seems to be that all current web video formats better watch their back, as there is a new open-source option in town that has some very big friends. Perhaps even more interesting was the news on the Adobe Flash Platform Blog that upcoming releases of Flash Player would support the VP8 video codec. It certainly feels like some seismic changes could occur.

More information can be found on the WebM project homepage, also read the full news about Flash player supporting VP8 on the Adobe Flash Platform Blog.

Google Wave

There was also some ripples of good news on the Google Wave front, with the news that Wave is now available to everyone via Google Labs. No more scrounging around for an invite, just visit the Google Wave homepage to sign up.

More information can be found on the Google Wave Blog.

For those still hungry for information – access the Matt Cutts live Wave experience or watch the Google I/O Keynotes on YouTube.

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