When Google announces a new product, you have to get a little excited. Their newest, announced today, is the Chrome Web Store, which will make it easy for anyone to pay for and download applications over the internet or to mobile phones. According to Google Vice President Sundar Pichai, Google wants to make it easy to create and sell a premium web application, and the new Web Store is the delivery vehicle for those applications.
The store will only be available through Google’s Chrome web browser, which may boost its numbers from 70 million users. The store will use the same basic model as Apple’s App Store, with free and paid applications being mixed in together. The NYT reports that most of the “applications” being offered are “just flashy websites”.
Google also announced a new video format dubbed webm, based on technology they acquired through the purchase of On2 Technologies earlier in 2010. Executives from Mozilla and Opera were on hand to pledge their support of the new video format.
The changes were announced at Google’s annual Google I/O conference, which presented a vision of the future in which everything was centered around the web, with multimedia applications that function within the web browser rather than as separate applications that must be downloaded onto a device.
“The Web is the most important platform of our generation,” said Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, who introduced the session on the first morning of the two-day conference. “Because it’s a platform controlled by none of us, it’s the only platform truly controlled by all of us. It’s our duty to move that platform forward.”
Some of the other highlights of the conference included MugTug, which showed off a full-featured photo editing tool which can function inside a web browser, and the web application for Sports Illustrated that featured a customizable browser-based version of the magazine.
As Reported By: Reuters, The New York Times
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