Google on Wednesday took another step in its Web video strategy by announcing its intention to buy On2 Technologies, a creator of high-quality video compression technology.

Google engineering director Jeremy Doig said in a statement issued Wednesday morning that he could not talk specific product plans, but that Google was in favor of improved Web video.

“Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform,” Doig wrote. “To that end, we’re happy to announce today that we’ve signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology.”

On2 claims that more than 2 billion units of its On2 Video VPx codecs, which include On2 VP6 for Adobe Flash Player and JavaFX, On2 VP7, and On2 VP8, have been installed. Customers include Adobe, AOL, Skype, Nokia, XM Satellite Radio, Sony, Yamaha, TI, LSI Logic, Analog Devices, VideoEgg, Brightcove, and Cox.

“In the meantime, we expect nothing to change for our customers and partners,” John Luther, director of marketing at On2, in a blog post. “We’ll continue to do our best to provide the great technology and service that our customers expect, and we look forward to signing on the next generation of customers to On2 video. We remain as committed as ever to serving you.”

The company said it expects the deal to go through by the fourth quarter of this year. It’s still subject to review by stockholders and all the relevant government agencies.

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If you’re under 25 and use Twitter, you’re not the source of the site’s tremendous growth. While we recently questioned the findings of a largely anecdotal report from Morgan Stanley written by a 15 year old, Nielsen has now produced figures that confirm the trend: young people don’t Tweet.

More precisely, Nielsen has compiled data from its NetRatings panel of 250,000 US Internet users and discovered that there are fewer young people on Twitter than on the Internet as a whole: one quarter of US Internet users are under 25, Nielsen says, but only 16% of Twitter users lie in that age range. While Nielsen is only measuring people who visit Twitter.com (not desktop and mobile clients), the analytics firm additionally claims that over 90% of TweetDeckusers are over 25, making it unlikely that there are masses of uncounted young people on third-party Twitter apps.

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Already noted for its speed, Google Chrome has released a new beta today promising another 30 percent performance improvement. There are also a few new features that let you add significant customization to the look and feel of the browser.

One of my favorite features of Chrome, the quick links to your 9 most visited sites when you open a new tab, is now customizable, letting you move any site you’d like quick access to into one of the slots.

Meanwhile, the so-called Omnibox (the address bar in other browsers) has become a bit easier to understand, with a series of icons “helping you distinguish between suggested sites, searches, bookmarks, and sites from your browsing history.”

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Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser has just hit a new milestone, reaching its 1 billionth user download. The big event happened Thursday night, according to the company’s official download counter.

To be clear, that’s 1 billion total downloads since Firefox’s 2004 debut — an atypical type of statistic to flaunt. Still, if you look at the more standard measures of success, Firefox is showing impressive growth, while the long-time industry giant continues to slide.

Firefox and the Browser Market

Measuring the first 30 days of July, Firefox holds an average of 30.5 percent of the global browser market, according to data from Web metrics firm StatCounter. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, sits at 60.12 percent. Safari and Chrome are tied at just over 3 percent, and Opera trails behind at 2.65 percent.

Where those numbers become more significant is in a year-to-year comparison: For the same time period in 2008, Firefox held 26.07 percent of the global browser market, while IE held 68.64 percent. Safari had 3.31 percent, Opera had 1.77 percent, and Chrome — well, Chrome was still just an improper noun back then.

Putting that into perspective, Firefox has grown its userbase by 17 percent, comparing its July ’08 and July ’09 numbers. IE, in the same comparison, has lost 12.4 percent of its users worldwide. Even the recent release of Internet Explorer 8 did little to help win over new fans for the once untouchable heavyweight.

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The Onion have just announced the exclusive news of Apple’s new iPhone, this iPhone is said to be the fastest and most powerful iPhone yet, not only this but the new iPhone has one of the most innovative features we have ever seen in a handset, this new feature only allows Apple’s hippest and most dedicated customers.

Having not been much of an Apple fan personally I have not yet seen the new iPhone 3Gi, however it is said to boast significant hardware and software upgrades, it also has superior processing speeds, a richer multi touch screen interface also the display is said to have the most brilliant colors and the finest resolution ever imagined.

Check out TheOnion for the exclusive news, which includes more details.

Are you cool enough to have seen the new iPhone 3Gi? If so please let us know your opinion.