I’ve been trying my best to live the Splashtop life lately. Basically, I’ve been utilizing Splashtop on a daily basis in different ways so I can better help influence the user experience. A lot of startups “eat their own dogfood” as the saying goes and DeviceVM is no different.

Lately, I’ve been really impressed with a new IPTV service called Hulu. Hulu is an online offering comprising of a whole host of American TV networks. Together, they offer a series of high quality programs and movies that can be streamed onto your computer via your web browser - the Splashtop Browser is no exception. If you want to read more about Hulu, here’s a great article that talks about how Hulu is coming out of Beta and going international soon.

I made a quick video about watching Hulu content using Splashtop on an EeePC. Check it out:

As part of our ongoing series of posts about how to use Splashtop to its full advantage, I wanted to tell you about Mahalo.

Mahalo is a “human-powered search engine” that competes with traditional algorithm based search engines like Google and Yahoo!. The theory behind Mahalo (as I understand it) is that while Google may return lots of relevant keyword results, it is also cluttered with advertisements and spam. Mahalo seeks to avoid spammy results by having actual human people submit and review results for a given search term to make sure they are truly relevant and useful.

If you think that sounds labor intensive, you’re right. But users can sign up for an account and submit results they think make sense; other users vote on the relevance, making it a a very social, user-driven experience. Mahalo was started by internet mainstay Jason Calacanis - we actually met Jason at Blog Haus during this year’s CES in Las Vegas.

Comscore shows that their popularity and traffic is skyrocketing - they have over 2 million monthly page-views now. From their own “about us” page:

We focus on the areas where traditional search engines struggle

Search results for certain categories, such as products, travel, cars, and health, are cluttered with people selling things, making it difficult to find great information on those topics. We focus on those topics and provide organized results that offer great links for every type of info you could need.

My own experience is that for very generic searches Mahalo has lots of results, most of which are strongly relevant. For very specific or esoteric search terms there may not much in the way of Mahalo results, but they will still display Google results, or returns from other search engines.

Another very worthwhile feature of Mahalo is Mahalo Daily, a video blog hosted by internet personality Veronica Belmont. Mahalo Daily videos are usually tech-related and very topical. They’re also pretty fun. Here’s todays:

Splashtop, as you know, allows you to instantly boot up your computer and access the internet. Our full-featured Splashtop browser will let you make use of the whole variety of rich internet applications available out there in the ether. Mahalo is one such, and well worth visiting.

As reported this morning by Venture Beat, among others, DeviceVM has new partners in Merus Capital, an awesome venture firm that was started by some ex-Google and Microsoft executives. It’s especially cool because we’re the first company that Merus has invested in! Here’s what Venture Beat says:

“The investment is notable because it is the first investment the firm, founded by Salman Ullah, the recently departed vice president of business development at Google, Sean Dempsey, former Principal of Corporate Development at Google, and Peter Hsing, former Managing Director of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft (our coverage of Ullah’s new fund, here).”

Also, we’re really excited that Larry Augustin, founder of SourceForge, has joined our board of directors. Larry is a really nice guy with lots of insight as to how we can make our software more accessible to the larger community.

Personally, I’m enthused that such quality individuals see the vision of DeviceVM and want to help shape it. The ability to access your favorite web applications seconds after you hit the power button is a simple concept, but making sure that such important technology reaches every consumer will take a team of dedicated employees, investors and advisers. Welcome to the team Merus Capital and Larry Augustin!

Things were certainly busy at the Asus booth where Splashtop was given a small, but effective, enclave. We were visited by interested consumers, potential business parters and members of the press. The press were curious how Splashtop could provide access to your favorite web applications seconds after you hit the power button. Was it true? Was it really that fast? Some press even took out their stopwatches to time it.

One of the cooler press experiences was when Robert Scoble came over to do a live streaming webcast of David giving a demo of Splashtop running on an Asus F8SA Notebook. He was using a Nokia N95 camera to live stream the whole thing to the web. I stood behind Robert and watched the screen as he was filming. I was amazed that comments and questions were popping up on the screen in real time from the audience who were watching the live webcast. It’s amazing how “instant” the back and forth of Robert and the audience was. The technology that makes that happen is incredible.

Webcast below from Qik:

Here are a few other articles that featured Splashtop:

David did a good job being interviewed by Gottabemobile. Click here to watch that video.

Check us out on Techgage.

Or, read about us on Phoronix.

MIT Technology Review had some good stuff to say, click here for that.

Finally, the folks at Engadget stirred up some controversy with this article. I should probably mention that there are no definite plans of putting Splashtop on the EeePC. We just thought it would make giving demos easy and portable.

Thanks to everyone who visited us at the Asus booth! Can’t wait for CES 2009!

Today was day 3 in the Splashtop CES “area” (nestled in the Asus booth). We had lots of people come hang out, watch our demo and consider what might be next for our instant-on system. Here are a few pics from the last couple of days…

Here is a picture of us winning our award with Harry McCracken from PC World.

This is Mark Lee, our CEO, giving a demonstration - we sure gave a lot of demos.

This is our table in the Asus booth. As you can see, we are proudly displaying our award.

This last picture is David giving the folks from Gottabemobile.com a demo. They wrote a cool article about us too.

So Robert Scoble came to the ASUS booth today. For those not in the know, Robert is a former MS guy and started one of the very first blogs, called “Scobleizer.” Scobleizer to this day is one of the most widely read blogs around.

As part of his blogging duties Robert interviews and investigates various technologies and finds innovative ways to share the information, things like qik; qik allows you to stream video from your cell phone, and publish it to people who want to view your videos. From the qik “about” page:

“Qik enables you to share moments of your life with your friends, family and the world - directly from your cell phone!”

So Robert came to the booth with his (really cool) Nokia phone and filmed our Splashtop demo and elevator pitch. I won’t lie to you, it was a little intimidating being on camera. The video is embedded below:

It’s nice to have a chance to share Splashtop with the world, and to simultaneously embrace new and interesting ways of sharing content with readers and viewers. Thanks Robert for coming by the booth and giving us an interview and a neat video.

This is David; I wanted to pop up a quick post about my first tour of duty at our booth at CES. Today was the first day of CES 2008, and the traffic in Las Vegas Convention Center was impressive. Getting our badges was a challenge this morning because the registration computers were having issues. The Consumer Electronics Show computers were down… irony is truly the spice of life.

To deal with the mammoth lines the convention employees handed out temporary badges. Bright orange stickers that say “Temporary” on them. Not the coolest looking badges in the whole world, but they got us inside.

After those hiccups, my tour of duty at the booth was almost a relief. It was a lot of fun actually. Quite a few members of the press / Blog-o-sphere came by to see us and check out the new demos. In addition to the P5E3 Premium motherboard (which just launched recently) we are showing off a new ASUS M70 laptop demo with Splashtop on it. For ASUS notebooks, Splashtop is being branded as “Instant Fun.” The notebook demo is really cool, and everyone seemed duly impressed. Thanks to all of you who stopped by to chat and to check out our demos - we appreciate the support.

Booth duty is mostly pretty fun, especially when the booth is hopping. Interesting people from all over the world come to CES, and I am constantly impressed with all the exciting innovations.

We will continue to update the blog throughout the show. If you’re here at the show, please stop by and say hello.

Thanks everyone,

David

This picture is out of my hotel room window:

We’re having a lot of fun already. Oh, wait! I meant we are working very hard here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Want to come and see us? This is where we’re at.

Our booth has been pretty busy so far. We have had a lot of press, bloggers, interested consumers and friends stopping by and hanging out. Asus has been very helpful in making sure we have everything we need to make a good impression on our visitors. It’s been especially cool for me to get to know the Asus people better.

I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to walk around yet. I think that there’s a lot to see. The HP booth looks especially awesome this year and they’re giving out these big laptop stickers. I need to grab one of those.

Tonight is ShowStoppers. That’s where we’re going to get our award from PC World as one of the 25 most innovative products of 2007. After that we’re going to celebrates David’s birthday. He’s 30. Ouch.

Today is David’s 30th birthday. He’s on the marketing team here at DeviceVM. Tonight we’re going to celebrate. For now, however, I thought I’d put up this funny picture of David rocking out.

CES has begun and we are here. Come visit us. I will be blogging if I can get a break from giving Demos. We are in the Asus booth.

The Splashtop team will be in the ASUS booth, which is located in the Las Vegas Convention Center in South Hall 4, 35162.