Google’s YouTube division confirmed today that it is buying Green Parrot Pictures, an Ireland-based video technology company.

The site, which gets over  35 hours of video uploaded every minutes, says it hopes to use the technology by the Irish firm to improve the quality of the many blurry, jerky, and unsteady amateur videos uploaded to the site daily — as those shared recently, for example, by political protestors in Libya.

When a video is uploaded to the site, it is processed by YouTube and converted to the various sizes and formats offered by the site. The integration of this technology, which would act as an additional filter for restoring and improving quality, could be instrumental to the millions of YouTube users who watch and share videos on the site.

Green Parrot Pictures was founded by Anil Kokaram, an Associate Professor at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Its technology, which improves video quality by offering tools to stabilize an image and remove flickers, noises, and blotches, has been used in movies such as Lord of the Rings, X-Men, and Spider-Man.

A couple weeks ago, the site also announced that it is buying Next New Networks, a video production and distribution company to help content partners an emerging talent. The price of both acquisitions have not been disclosed. MotionDSP‘s vReveal software can also sharpen and stabilize blurry videos.

Storwize, a company dedicated to real-time data compression (compressing data as it’s being accessed by users), announced today that it has been acquired by IBM.

The company’s “Random Access Compression Engine” (RACE) technology can help clients reduce storage requirements by up to 80 percent, and can compress a variety of files — including databases, virtualization images — that clients are using in real-time. Most other compression companies can’t touch data that’s in use, and are limited to compressing backups.

The acquisition is expected to finalize in the third quarter of 2010. No financial details were disclosed, but we previously reported that IBM was looking to spend $140 million for the company.

Storwize offers two appliances, the STN-2100 and STN-6000, and it says they can be transparently deployed within a client’s network, with no visible impact to users or IT processes. The appliances support common network storage (NAS) protocols like CIFS and NFS, and will work with IBM NAS systems like its N Series and SONAS, as well as solutions from other companies like HP and NetApp.

Based in Marlborough, Mass., and founded in 2004, Storwize has thus far collected $40 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital, Tamares Group and Tokyo Electron Device.

Check out a video of Doug Balog, vice president of IBM storage, discussing the acquisition below:

Investors included Charles River Ventures and Formative Ventures.

From the company’s statement:

Samplify recently launched its high-speed, FPGA-based sampled-data compression technology. Samplify’s technology can compress real-time signals up to 40 Giga samples per second, solving the storage and bandwidth bottlenecks typically found in medical imaging, wireless infrastructure, automated test, military, and instrumentation systems.

“The support of two top-tier venture capital firms, Charles River Ventures and Formative Ventures, is a strong endorsement of Samplify’s technology and strategy,” said AlWegener, Samplify founder and CTO. “Samplify’s patented algorithms are designed to
address the significant limitations in high-performance data acquisition, transfer, and storage.”

Bruce Sachs of Charles River Ventures and Brian Connors of Formative Ventures will both be joining Samplify’s Board.