On Wednesday, Google celebrated open web standards at its third annual developer convention in San Francisco with a present and a sight into the future, a video codec valued over $120 million and a trailer of the Company's upcoming app store for the Web.

Google's VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra said, "The Web is the most important platform of our generation and because it's a platform controlled by none of us, it's the only platform that belongs to all of us".

As has been broadly expected since Google first declared its objective to buy video technology firm On2 last summer; Google released On2's VP8 video codec as royalty free, open-source software. Video codecs codes and interprets video information.

Another key video codec, H. 264, is supported by Apple and Microsoft. But it is intolerable to the open source community for dread of potential copyright licensing claims.

Both Apple and Microsoft have donated copyrights to MPEG-LA, the group supervising H. 264 licensing.

Mozilla has declined to apply H. 264 to defend itself from probable royalty demands.

Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering at Mozilla, spoke for a short time on stage and made his fondness obvious for open standards.