Google and On2 Technologies jointly announced today that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Google will acquire On2, a developer of video compression technology. The acquisition is expected to close later this year. On2 markets video compression technologies that power high-quality video in both desktop and mobile applications and devices and also holds a number of interesting patents.

Some of its codec designs are known as VP3, VP4, VP5, TrueMotion VP6, TrueMotion VP7 and VP8. Its customers include Adobe, Skype, Nokia, Infineon, Sun Microsystems, Mediatek, Sony, Brightcove, and Move Networks. On2, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, is headquartered in Clifton Park, NY.

Under the terms of the agreement, each outstanding share of On2 common stock will be converted into $0.60 worth of Google class A common stock in a stock-for-stock transaction. The transaction is valued at approximately $106.5 million.

According to the release, $0.60 per share represents a premium of approximately 57% over the closing price of On2’s common stock on the last trading day immediately prior to the announcement of the transaction, and a premium of approximately 62% over the average closing price of On2’s common stock for the six month period immediately prior to the announcement of the transaction.

Important to note is that On2 once had a market cap in excess of $1 billion at its peak, after going public on the American Stock Exchange in 1999 following a merger with Applied Capital Funding (which was already listed at the time). Before its entry on the public market, The Duck Corporation had raised $6.5M in venture capital funding from Edelson Technology Partners and Citigroup Ventures.

Back in 2001, On2 made waves by releasing their VP3 compression technology to the open-source community, including their patents on the technology. The technology lives on in the form of (Ogg) Theora. You can find more information about this here.

The agreement is subject to On2 stockholder approval, regulatory clearances and other closing conditions.

Google is reluctant to dive into specific regarding the product plans until after the deal closes, although it’s conceivably related to its immensely popular video service YouTube.

In a blog post, the company says:

If would be great if Google decides to open-source On2’s VP7 and VP8 video codecs and free them up as the worldwide video codec standards, thus becoming alternatives to the proprietary and licenced H264 codecs. On2 has always claimed VP7 is better quality than H264 at the same bitrate.

Also noteworthy: Google could use the VP8 codec for YouTube in HTML5 mode, basically forcing its many users to upgrade to HTML5-compliant browsers instead of using Flash formats.

Smart move by Google, and possibly great news for innovation in web-based video viewing.

Expect updates if and when we learn more.

Google ditched its browser sync plug-in for Firefox a year ago, but the idea is resurfacing in Chrome in a way that makes me think of possibilities the technology could hold for Chrome OS.

The company is preparing to build a system to synchronize bookmarks across different versions of Chrome, Google's Tim Steele said in a mailing list posting on Friday. Google envisions extending the feature to other data types, including passwords, Steele and fellow programmer Idan Avraham said in a follow-up posting.

"We wanted to focus on bookmarks and get it right first before we think about other data types. We chose bookmarks both because they are generally the most important to users, but also because they are the hardest data type to sync," Avraham said.

Synchronizing bookmarks is a fairly basic concept. The Xmarks plug-in, formerly called Foxmarks, has solved the issue for years on Firefox, so users could move from a work computer to a home computer and still have their saved Web addresses intact. Google had its own though now extinct option, and now Mozilla itself is building a plug-in called Weave that synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, tabs, and other information. Yahoo's Delicious service has been available for years for people to store bookmarks centrally in the cloud and to share them with contacts as well.

So it's no surprise Google feels compelled to add bookmark sync to Chrome--especially given that the company plans to use a person's Google Account to save the list. Google likes the idea of storing the state of people's applications in the cloud, even if they're relying on a local computer's horsepower to run.

Bookmark sync will arrive gradually; initially there won't be a way to sync bookmarks using Google Bookmarks service that can be used directly or through Google's browser toolbar, Steele said in another message. "For the first release, we've just focused on getting sync to work between Chrome instances," Steele said.

The synchronization feature may be a basic utility, but Google sees it as much more than just updating a list of links. In fact, it chose to use Google's own high-powered Google Talk infrastructure to handle the service, the design document states. Essentially, that means browsers only need to listen for broadcasts when a change occurs rather than frequently check in for them:

There are other synchronization possibilities for the browser. Peter Kasting, another Chrome programmer, offered his personal wish list: "I'm more interested in history/visited link/omnibox syncing than bookmarks," he said in a posting. Synchronizing those elements would mean one instance of Chrome would behave more like another, for example being able to retrieve more easily the address of a Web site that a user already visited on another computer.

But the high-powered infrastructure raises some interesting possibilities in the long run. Who needs a hyper-responsive utility just for synchronizing bookmarks or browser history lists? When was the last time you were saving bookmarks so fast that there was a danger multiple updates would run afoul of each other?

The thought I had is that perhaps Chrome OS could benefit from a high-speed message-passing interface. After all, on Chrome OS, Chrome gets the glamorous job of running the Web applications, with the underlying Linux operating system handling more mundane hardware duties.

Perhaps there are situations in which sending lots of XMPP messages could help Google-hosted applications stay in tune with each other. Google Wave, which uses XMPP already to power its group-chat abilities, is one example that springs to mind. Today that's a Web application that doesn't need a browser to handle that lower-level interaction, but might it work better if it were built in? Gmail can use IMAP to keep the same inbox synchronized among different computers, but maybe this would be easier and faster?

Then again, as Freud said, sometimes a train is just a train.

Twitter's new malware filter is a sign the social media site is stepping up efforts to stem attacks, but the measure has its shortcomings, say security experts.

Twitter's filtering mechanism was highlighted by Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of F-Secure, in a blog post Monday. When a user tries to submit a tweet with a suspect Web link, the following warning appears:

Twitter's latest security measure was a positive one, especially in light of the current threats directed at the site, Hypponen told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview. The site, he noted, has been "attacked in many ways" including spam, worms such as Mikeyy, and phishing, he noted.

"None of these problems are at epidemic levels yet, but it's great to see Twitter take real action on this," he said.

Hacking is another challenge the popular microblogging site faces. In May, Twitter confirmed its network was hacked and some individual account information were leaked.

Dancho Danchev, independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, noted that the site's latest security move was an indication "Twitter is finally moving from reactive to proactive security practices." However, he pointed out in a blog post on ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet.com, that the malware filter was "clearly still in development" and showed "disappointing results."

Danchev pointed to how a MySpace phishing page used in a tweet triggered the security filter, but was eventually accepted by adding a "http://" or removing the "www".

He noted that the site also allowed tweets containing links to several known malicious sites listed in Stopbadware's database, which has identified over 380,000 sites identified as unsafe. While it would not prevent the abuse of Twitter in the longer term, the failure to integrate such databases listing known malware was a "missed opportunity", Danchev said.

Twitter did not respond to e-mail queries from ZDNet Asia at press time.