Rather than typing up two different articles on each since there's not really much to say about the Chrome Web Store, I thought I'd combine both announcements from Google I/O in one article. Let's start with the Google Chrome Web Store. Google will be launching... you guessed it, a Chrome web store. It's basically an app store but on the internet. Developers will be able to publish their web apps either free or paid and they will be able to be downloaded/purchased. In my opinion, it's sort of like iPad is to iPhone as Web Store is to extensions. It will be available at the end of the summer. (By the way, did you know Bitts has a Google Chrome extension?) Now for the more important announcement...

Google has announced their own open web video format today at Google I/O called WebM, based off of VP8. Support will be added for the format in Chrome, Opera, and Firefox using HTML5's video tag. Plus, starting today as part of YouTube's motive to offer videos in HTML5 in addition to Flash, 720p or higher quality videos will be encoded in the WebM format as well as H.264. It is said to have great video performance on both old and new computers, very high quality, and as mentioned, 100% free and open.

It's a great open alternative to the Ogg Theora format, currently the main codec supported by HTML5.