Sergei pointed me to this awesome post (I love the title - achieving Nerdvana) about a Church using Splashtop on an EeeBox. As you know, Splashtop comes on the EeeBox and they make a fantastic pair. A lot of posts I read are about technical reviews of devices with Splashtop or news about new devices using Splashtop (there are always a lot of those!). The cool thing about this post is that it has to do with real world usage of Splashtop. In this case it’s a Church and a Youth Group in the UK. Here’s a quote:

“I can see this saving space and increasing performance at the youth club; if I restricted it to SplashTop then they would be limited in what they could hack on the OS at youth club.”

From our perspective this is a great use of Splashtop. Let’s face it, teens tend to do things to computers that might end up harmful for the machine (no matter what the good intent). Splashtop is an environment that is very locked down and secure. Teens can still browse their favorite sites, watch YouTube and share content but you restrict the potential damage that can be done. And I’m not being anti-teen. Funny enough, my mother-in-law tends to do much of the same damage when she visits.

So remember, Splashtop is an excellent choice when you want a safe experience that doesn’t overly restrict the end user.

Thanks for the post, parishLife!

This is what it looked like in Las Vegas a couple of days ago. They had a rare snow “event” right on the Strip. It snarled traffic, closed the airport and forced everyone to stay inside the luxurious casinos. Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Well, the DeviceVM team will be on hand as usual featuring our Splashtop product running on an array of rad, drool worthy devices in the Innovation Pod. Yep, we’re stepping up to the BIG TIME. Our own pod. They call it a pod because it’s smaller than a booth but it will be a mighty pod! In addition, we’ll be supporting some new threads which I think we’re all pretty excited about (we decided if we can’t have a giant 3-level booth we might as well look really hot).

Enough rambling, here’s where we’re at:

Innovation Pods, booth IP200.

So, come and see us. We promise to give you an awesome demo of our latest technology. We also promise that it won’t take very long. After all, we boot in seconds.

PC makers send us their new models early in the design process, so we can fully optimize Splashtop before these new computers show up at your local Best Buy.

Sometimes, Splashtop Labs receive a PC even before its physical casing has been designed. We figured out that a pizza box makes a good temporary replacement - you can tape the screen, the WiFi antenna, and the web cam to the lid of the box, as you can see in the photo.

Extra bonus points if you can guess which Splashtop-enabled computer this is!

We just picked this up off the wire. Here’s a great demo of Splashtop (as the Voodoo IOS) given by HP CTO Rahul Sood. Not only does he give a great demo of the product, he also talks about why IOS is important. It’s not a very long video because our system boots so fast! Check it out:

Did you ever wonder what happens when you press the power button on your PC and may see all that text on the screen, before your operating system even starts grinding its wheels?

The first moments of your PC’s consciousness are inhabited by what is known as BIOS. That’s code that wakes up and prepares all the hardware components of you PC. Then it passes control to the operating system. Before Splashtop, operating systems would commonly take a few minutes to get going, so it was no problem for BIOS to also take its time. Many of the tasks BIOS would carry out were not at all required for browsing the web: “Do we have any joysticks connected? No? How about plotters?..”

Now the spotlight is on getting online quickly, and we are working with BIOS makers, as well as the in-house BIOS teams of PC OEMS, to make sure that the overall BIOS + Splashtop experience is as good as possible. We just announced our partnership with Insyde Software. They are a leading BIOS maker. This collaboration is about making sure that when their BIOS and our Splashtop are on the same system, the pieces know what to do to get you online as fast as possible. Besides, the electricity you consume while browsing depends on how well your system can control various hardware components. Being able to talk to the BIOS is handy again!

This is the second post covering the work done in Splashtop Labs to make Splashtop the fastest ever way to get online. For the first story, check here.

I’ve been wanting to do some video blogging for a while. Recently, I was hanging out in an office building in Santa Cruz. I walked around and asked people about their computer usage. Here are the results!

Splashtop Blog #1 from Sol Lipman on Vimeo.

People often ask us why it is that they can only get Splashtop as pre-installed software on new PCs, but cannot download it onto their old computer. While some of this has to do with business issues, I want to cover the technical side.

Much of our engineering is dedicated to making Splashtop start up in seconds. After all, this is what people love about Splashtop. It turns out that to do a good job at starting up, you need to do many optimizations for the particular hardware that you run on. Here is an example:

Splashtop Labs have been investigating why some notebooks take longer to start than their apparently identical twins. We tracked the difference down to the different GPUs used in similar notebook versions. We discovered that the way you initialize a particular GPU may add as much as 2 seconds to the boot time – a big deal if you are trying to be up and running in 5! We would like to think that GPU vendors will optimize their products for fast start up, however, we know they have many other priorities. So the buck stops with Splashtop.

To do this level of tuning, we work closely with manufacturers on each new platform, and optimize Splashtop for the particular GPU and other hardware you will be getting. Sounds like a lot of work? It is, but Splashtop is already on dozens of products.

I decided to contribute a few blog posts along Sol’s regular posts, to shed some light on what our team is doing in the Lab to keep Splashtop the fastest way to get online. Stay tuned for more.

- Sergei