I just gave a presentation on Mozilla's new JPEG-improving project mozjpeg as part of my 'image technology' module at university. We had to chose an emerging technology to research and present to the class in pairs.
We chose to cover a new project run by Mozilla (the makers of FireFox) where they're aiming to breath new life into the JPEG format which has seen little improvement in over a decade. Having efficient image compression is very important as the internet has to carry an ever-increasing number of images (read 'cat photos').
Companies like Google and Microsoft have tried to introduce completely new formats such as WebP which give vastly better compression ratios, but very few people are going to use them until they're more widely compatible. So in the meantime, Mozilla believes a lot of work can be done to improve the compression of the standard JPEG format - by introducing newer algorithms used by modern video codecs - while still being compatible with pretty much all software in the world.
Click 'Start Prezi' below to view the presentation slides.