Researching the internet is so much fun. Really. I don’t think any other market can offer such abundance of amazing discoveries. The hunger for understanding the phenomena behind the ongoing development of the Net often leads to extensive research projects. Their complexity derives from the fact that the internet is a demanding and secretive object for analysis. But every now and then the internet gets into a nonchalant mood and shows off with something truly extraordinary. Today I’m going to tell you one simple story of a device that has recently stirred some turmoil. It’s name is Apple iPad.

May saw an important event for the internet industry: it was in that month that Warsaw’s Fabryka Trzciny was home to the InternetCEE conference, one of the landmark events of this kind in this part of Europe. The topics raised at this year’s conference were varied as usual, but nearly all presentations and talks were consistently orbiting around the subject of the two most current issues – the effectiveness of marketing in social networks and the potential lurking in the mobile internet. Today’s entry will shortly discuss the latter.

The drama that was unfolding over the last couple of months started off innocently. In a nutshell –YouTube decided to switch to the HTML5 standard and give up the Flash technology whatsoever. The internet buzzed with the crucial question: if a service like this abandons Flash, then how is it going to provide access to the video content? By using some kind of video compression, of course. But what would it be? Basically, there are two types of codecs available on the market: free but shoddy or good but expensive. For the owner of YouTube, i.e. Google, the price may not be the crucial issue and this is why they started to search for the best technology available for their product. For quite some time, the main candidate was h.264 created by the MPEG group. But then another problem cropped up – a one affecting browser creators: it is now up to them to assume full responsibility for decoding video files.

Featured today is a thriller about the recent adventures of the internet video. Many will say that trying to find a bombshell in this subject means a dangerous drift towards utter exaggeration. Well, if you’re one of them, I’m going to have to disappoint you. The major players of the online industry have lately been faced with an important and responsible task – they had to decide about the future of internet multimedia. But, first things first.