Today Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) opens I/O 2010, its largest developer conference of the year. The event, which sold out 10 weeks in advance, is being held May 19 and 20 at Moscone West in San Francisco. More than 5,000 attendees from 66 countries will take part in close to 100 technical sessions, breakouts, and fireside chats. I/O 2010 will feature more than 200 speakers, as well as a number of informal opportunities to meet with engineers from Google and partner companies, including demonstrations from more than 180 different companies and a special after-hours event.

This year's I/O event is a recognition and celebration of the web's evolution into the software development platform of choice. It's also an opportunity for Google to share its work in moving the web forward and keeping it open. The web has become more powerful in more places -- from enterprise deployments to mobile handsets.

"Think of how far the web has come since last year's Google I/O, where we demonstrated the potential of HTML5," said Vic Gundotra, Google vice president of developer platforms. "Since calling attention to HTML5 last year, we've been thrilled to see the industry rally around making the web faster, more capable, and available in more places. From enterprises to consumers, from the smallest form factors to the largest, the web's reach and increasing capability make it the platform for the future."

Google's announcements today enable developers to take full advantage of the web platform:

An open, global platform means better performance and broader access for all applications

• Chrome Web Store: Google is announcing the Chrome Web Store, an open marketplace for web apps that helps people find the best web applications across the internet and allows developers to reach new users.
• WebM Project: Google joined a broad array of companies and web community members to announce WebM, an open web media format project. We have open-sourced VP8, a high-quality, web-optimized video codec, and are contributing to the project under a royalty-free license.
• Wave open sign-ups: Google Wave is open to all users at wave.google.com, as a Google Labs product -- no invitation needed. Google Apps administrators will also have the option to add Wave as a Labs feature for their domains, helping groups of people communicate and work together more productively.

The web is ready for enterprise-class app development

• App Engine for Business: Google App Engine for Business lets companies build and maintain their own applications on the same scalable infrastructure that powers Google applications, with added management and support features tailored specifically for the enterprise. New capabilities for businesses include the ability to manage all the apps in an organization from one place, simple pricing based on users and applications, premium developer support, a 99.9% uptime service level agreement, and coming later this year, access to premium features like cloud-based SQL and SSL.
• VMware Collaboration: Google and VMware introduce cloud portability, which makes it easy for Java developers to use familiar tools to rapidly develop and deploy rich web apps in the environments of their choice. In just one click, users of the new versions of SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Web Toolkit can deploy their application onto Google App Engine for Business, or a VMware environment, or other infrastructure such as Amazon EC2.

Also this year, more than 180 different companies will participate in the "Developer Sandbox," a place for the developer community to showcase applications they've built and share their experiences in working with the latest web and mobile technologies. As always, Google I/O will include a mix of practical, hands-on advice for building web apps, as well as opportunities to learn about and discuss emerging trends. Sessions will cover tools developed both inside and outside of Google, and topic areas will include: Android, App Engine, Chrome, Enterprise, Geo, Google APIs, Google Web Toolkit, Social Web, and Wave.

More information about Google I/O 2010 is available at http://code.google.com/events/io/.