During the opening keynote at the Google I/O conference this morning in San Francisco, the search giant unveiled new Web technologies and reaffirmed its commitment to open standards.

Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering, started the keynote by highlighting the waning relevance of desktop applications and discussing the significance of software's ascent into the cloud. The most important applications today are Web apps, he said. Although the Web has transformed the way that software is developed, deployed, and consumed, it has introduced new challenges that have to be overcome before it can fulfill its potential. The Web is growing up, Gundotra remarked, but the diverse ecosystem of Internet stakeholders must work together to ensure that it continues to advance.

"The Web is the most important platform of our generation," Gundotra told the crowd. "Our job as a community [is] to move the Web forward."

Sundar Pichai, Google VP of product management, discussed the growing importance of the Web as an application platform. HTML5 is gaining traction swiftly, he said, and is poised to bring a multitude of rich new capabilities to the Web. Pichai showed graphs that quantified the increasing support for HTML5 features in mainstream browsers, including Google's own Chrome. Web APIs for multimedia, filesystem interaction, geolocation, and support for hardware accelerated rendering have arrived, bringing the promise of a new generation of more sophisticated Web applications.

To illustrate some of the opportunities that are created by HTML5, Google demonstrated several key emerging standards that are used in the company's own popular Web applications. For example, one demo showed how users can attach a file to a Gmail message using drag-and-drop.

Web video

One of the most significant new features introduced in HTML5 is native support for embedding videos in Web content. The HTML5 video element, which offers a standards-based alternative to the existing proprietary plugins for video playback, has the potential to make rich media a first-class citizen on the Web. Unfortunately, the lack of a high-performance royalty-free video codec made it difficult for browser vendors to reach consensus on a standard video format. Google hopes to end the impasse and accelerate the adoption of open video on the Web.

During the Google I/O keynote, Google revealed that it will be opening up the VP8 codec and making the underlying intellectual property available under royalty-free terms so VP8 can become a truly open standard for Internet video. The search giant has launched a project called WebM, which brings together the VP8 video codec and the royalty-free Ogg Vorbis audio codec. The company is collaborating with many different partners to ensure that WebM becomes ubiquitous. Mozilla and Opera have both enthusiastically embraced the initiative and have already experimentally implemented support in their own Web browsers.

Google invited Mozilla's Mike Shaver to demonstrate WebM working in a Firefox nightly build during the keynote. He showed how HTML5 video can be used in interactive websites alongside SVG and other kinds of rich content. His demo reflected the growing suitability of native Web standards for handling the full spectrum of animation, media, and interactivity that users want on the Web.

Although standards-based Web technology was a prominent theme of the keynote, Google also affirmed its commitment to supporting plugins, such as its own Native Client technology and Adobe's Flash player. The company stressed the importance of plugins for enabling game development, too. For example, one demo showed a 3D LEGO Star Wars game that was implemented in a port of the Unity engine on top of Native Client.

Web app store and catching the Wave

To improve the discoverability of Web applications, Google is launching a Web store that will operate a lot like the Android marketplace. Users will be able to find Web applications through the store and add Web application shortcuts to the Chrome new tab screen. The store will be a crucial part of Chrome OS, Google's upcoming browser-centric operating system that is built on top of the Linux platform. The Web store will also make it possible for developers to sell Web applications through an integrated purchasing system.

Google's Wave collaboration platform also got a boost this morning. Google is opening up Wave to everyone, eliminating the need for invitations. The company is also going to roll out Wave in Google Apps, making it easy for companies to run a hosted Wave instance on their own domains. New APIs are being made available that will simplify client application development, particularly for mobile environments.

When Google launched the private Wave beta last year, the company opened a considerable portion of the source code for the underlying collaboration engine and protocol. The goal was to ensure that third-party vendors would be able to create interoperable server software. Several companies, including SAP and Novell, have been able to bake Wave federation compatibility into their own collaboration software. In order to make it easier for third-party developers to build Web interfaces for Wave server software, Google is opening the source code of its interactive Wave editor.

The first day of Google I/O is off to a great start. Google has paved the way for a revolution in open Internet video and is taking important steps to strengthen the Web as an application platform.