image credit: geek.com

Well, this morning we have a BIG announcement. Thanks to our growing partnership with Asus, Splashtop is going to be shipping on over a million motherboards a month.

“In response to great user feedback, our plan is to proliferate Express Gate across our entire motherboard product portfolio, starting with over one million motherboards per month,” says Joe Hsieh, General Manager, ASUS Motherboard Business Unit. “Consumers want to turn their PCs on and off like any other appliance, and Express Gate has made that possible.”
Note that Express Gate is what Asus calls Splashtop.

This is obviously a big deal to us and everyone involved in DeviceVM. An incredible amount of hard work, patience and perseverance is paying off. To think that 1 million motherboard purchasers a month are going to get our environment is thrilling. Millions of people getting to their favorite web applications seconds after hitting the power button. This is what the team has worked so hard to provide.

Congratulations, everyone! This is just the beginning.

Rafe Needleman at Webware has already covered it here.

Sal Cangeloso over at Geek.com has covered it here.

Thanks Michael Larabel at Phoronix for covering it here.

Nice! We’re on slashdot here. Thanks Timothy.

Rob over at TECHGAGE did a very complete writeup here.

Check our press section for more stories about Splashtop and developments related to this announcement.

Great news for developers interested in Splashtop. I just got out of a very cool (albeit technical) meeting where I was told that a code release on our website is imminent. This is exciting for anyone who is interested in using the Splashtop code for any purpose. However, I was told to caution anyone downloading this code that it is an initial release. A more complete SDK will follow it soon whereby developers can really play with the Splashtop environment. This will be very exciting for Splashtop! More soon…

This morning, still wired from our exciting week, I was checking Google Alerts on Splashtop. There were a lot of links to blog posts where authors tried to position Splashtop in different ways. There were even more comments where readers speculated how Splashtop could become an OS. After all, Splashtop is based, in part, on Linux and there are lots of programs that run in the Linux environment. Naturally, readers have been requesting programs like OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Evolution, and Pidgin.

On the other side of the coin, a lot of folks have been asking us about our web browser, which is an optimized version of Firefox for our platform. Which plugins will you support? Is this going to become a WebOS? One posting asked if you can open documents in Google Docs and chat in Meebo why would you need any other platform-based apps? All of these are great questions.

OEMs and Manufacturers have specific requirements for us depending on the implementation. In the case of our first release with Asus, it was a web browser and Skype. In future implementations it might be media playback or diagnostic tools. We definitely see ourselves as an instant-on environment and not a traditional OS. Supporting a world of applications like Linux, Windows or OSX takes years of development.

We think the real opportunity is to get people where they want to go quickly and efficiently. On or Off, with nothing in between. We’d like to allow customers to add applications to the system and plugins to their web browser. But, we don’t see ourselves becoming a traditional OS competitor. Splashtop is a great companion to a traditional OS. Need to grab a quick map? Splashtop. Want to show your buddy a funny movie on YouTube? Splashtop. Have to edit a photo with some crazy liquid effect in Photoshop? Traditional OS.

For Splashtop to succeed, we have to be nimble and work with a variety of companies. As a small startup, we need to be able to partner with those who work on and support traditional Operating Systems. The same is true for our desire to collaborate with independent developers who can add significant value to Splashtop. We are quite simply focused on bringing value to consumers.

Well, my dog, Ernie (pictured below) is whining to go for a quick goodnight walk. Have a great Sunday wherever you are.