Not sure if this was posted elsewhere, but Google published a
draft overview of VP9 on the IETF website last month.
This morning, they also made a
blog post promising more details about VP9 over the next few weeks. In all likelihood, VP9 will be 'released' at Google I/O in May just like VP8 was back in 2010.
There's been a lot of code cleanups and speed improvements on libvpx's exp. branch over the past couple of weeks too. The encoder is a
lot faster now and seems about as fast as the old JM, which sounds like a terrible endorsement, but it's certainly better than before
. Half of the test batch I just made failed to decode though, so win some, lose some.