The new Splashtop.com

If you’re reading this on our site you’ve noticed that we’ve redesigned it. If you’re checking us out on a reader, then click here and look at what a beautiful site we have now. Yep, Sergei and the marketing team have been working hard to get us looking slicker, more professional and all around hotter. You’ll notice there’s a bunch more information for you to pour through so that you can know absolutely everything there is to know about Splashtop and the DeviceVM team. I tried to convince our team to put live webcams in their homes but that was unfortunately rejected.

The new Splashtop video

We also created a new video for Splashtop. It’s more professional. Great job Jacob who did most of the heavy lifting. Thanks also to Mazey, who is the new voice of Splashtop. I think you’ll find it entertaining and informative.

The Splashtop Song

Okay, this is kind of a joke. But, Mazey also happens to have an awesome singing voice. So, we convinced her to do a gospel version of the script she was working with on the Splashtop video. Here are the results.

Wouldn’t it be great of your computer turned on like an appliance?

Here at Splashtop we constantly think about how people use computers. The other day, Sergei came across this blog post from HP about just that subject…

The author, Susie Wee, categorized common PC usage into three categories:

1. Computer as a platform
2. Computer as an appliance
3. Computer as a browser

Taking into consideration what we’re doing here at Splashtop, this blog post is really fascinating.

First, with Splashtop, you get to the Internet seconds after you press the power button. The Splashtop browser is based on Firefox 2 with a Flash plug-in, so all popular web sites work perfectly. We also added Skype and IM into the mix, since we believe consumers want a complete internet experience. If you’re one of those people who find yourself using the browser most of the time, Splashtop gives you the best experience.

We also think of Splashtop as an Internet appliance. Appliances (think of a TV set or a stereo) can be instantly turned on or off, are simple to use, and excel at a few tasks for which they are designed. We are really good at getting you online fast just like a toaster is really good at making toast. That’s the way computers should work.

The platform is where Splashtop is different than a traditional operating system. Because we’re focused on getting you online fast and efficiently, we don’t feature a lot of applications that traditional operating systems support. High-end gaming or video production come to mind as applications that rely on a full Operating System.

I’m always asked how Splashtop compares with Windows. I think the goal of Splashtop says it all:

Get you to your favorite web applications seconds after you hit the power button.

It’s hard to get your head around the idea that a “pre-boot” Operating System can momentarily turn your computer into an internet appliance. We see Splashtop as a complementary environment to Windows. Windows and other Operating Systems like Ubuntu and OSX provide an application platform. If you want to play that high-end game, for instance, you’re going to need that traditional operating system.

Thanks to Susie Wee at HP for the insightful post.

Once again the DeviceVM team is at a conference and left me behind. They told me I had to “hold down the fort” or something. In between long lunches and hour long sessions of Guitar Hero, I thought I should put up a little post about Computex. After all, we’ve had some pretty impressive announcements as of late. First, we’re on millions of motherboards. Next, we’re launching on Notebooks.

My trusty friends, Sergei and Kevin have reported a lot of interest in our quick booting, web-centric environment. They say that our portion of the Asus booth is pretty full most of the day and that everyone wants to try out Express Gate (which is what Asus calls Splashtop). Here are some awesome pics from the booth. Thanks Sergei and Kevin - keep the pics coming!

Great news this morning! Our partner, Asus, will be putting Splashtop (branded as Express Gate) on several of their notebooks. This announcement, in advance of Computex, makes this the first official release of the Splashtop environment on notebooks. This is great news for us here at DeviceVM as we have been working hard to proliferate our instant web experience. In addition to our web browser, this version of Splashtop will also include chat, skype, photo management and even online gaming.

This announcement on the heels of our last big news, which projects that Splashtop will be embedded on 1,000,000 Asus motherboards per month, makes May a great month for DeviceVM. Everyone who has been working nights and weekends to make the promise of an instant web experience a reality has reason to be proud. Congratulations!

Here’s some early press coverage:

Engadget

Geek.com

Slashgear

Gizmoden

Techworld

Whenever we get some press, as we did this past week, I am asked both via email and in blog comments where the Source Code is and how to get it. I thought I’d put up a quick reminder post so that it was easily accessible.

This was from November 14th and the original post can be accessed here:

…at the bottom of the developers page you’ll see a link to download the source code. It’ll open up a form to fill out a bit of info (we promise not to spam you). It’s not a huge download (~12MB).

The same source code download is still there. Over the past several months thousands of developers have accessed the source code and we feel proud to be encouraging further development and to be fulfilling our obligations under the GPL.

One goal that is frequently discussed here at DeviceVM is to issue a complete and thorough SDK so that we can encourage development and harness the awesome power of the open source community. It is definitely on our roadmap and you can look for that SDK in the near future. Thanks for your comments, concerns and interest in Splashtop!

As usual, there’s all kinds of stuff going on over at DeviceVM. We’ve got business people traveling, engineers coding and bloggers blogging. Everyone is heads down working hard. This is a quick roundup of all things Splashtop.

Earth Day

As per my last post, we’re doing our part for that big blue and green planet we live on. We’d like you to do your part by checking out our challenge on Carbon Rally. I know I’m being a bit repetitive but I think that some of these facts are incredible considering how many of us leave our computers on 24 hours a day 7 days a week. By turning off your PC each night, you will reduce your CO2 emissions by a total of 51lbs for the month. That’s 51lbs of CO2! That amounts to $200/year in savings.

It’s being covered by some notable press. Check out the article here on Geek.com.

Matt Cutts gives Splashtop a Shout Out!

No we didn’t pay him ten bucks. And, he isn’t my cousin. He’s Matt Cutts and he’s an important dude to us geeks out there. First of all, he’s in charge of Spam for Google. Not creating Spam but preventing it. He’s also widely known as a technical visionary at Google. That’s why we were pretty stoked when Matt gave us a little shout out when asked, “What’s the most important, cool, scary, or useful product or technology (not made by your company) that’s recently arrived or on the horizon?”

He said us…Splashtop. Check it out…

“I like Splashtop, which uses a tiny version of Linux that can be built into motherboards. The result is an instant-boot operating system that comes for free when you buy (say) an ASUS motherboard. Lots of people know about virtualization and lightweight computers such as OLPC and the Asus EEE machine, but Splashtop strikes me as something different. Someone has to do the initial work to modify Linux to work as a built-in motherboard. But after that initial engineering effort, you get a product where paying for an operating system (OS) is entirely optional. A perfectly fine OS is built right into your motherboard when you buy it.”

Don’t believe me? Read it here.
Thanks Matt!

Web 2.0

This brings us to my last item on the roundup. I’m going to be around those halls at the Moscone this Wednesday, Thursday and Friday hanging out at Web 2.0. If you’re going to be there, please ping me - sol[at]devicevm[dot]com. I’ll have a Splashtop demo unit there if you’d like to try out the Operating System that puts the web at your fingertips!

I don’t know about our CEO, Mark Lee, but I’m nervous excited for our presentation at Under the Radar on Thursday of this week. There are a lot of reasons why our presentation is going rock. Mark presents first thing in the morning. This can make for a tough crowd depending on the amount of available coffee. But, really, this just means that everyone is fresh and ready to see some serious innovation. Next, we don’t just have a deck of slides like everyone else - we’re doing our presentation using Splashtop. A lot of companies talk about how their product works but we’ve made a commitment to “eating our dog food.” We work, browse and present with Splashtop whenever we can. Finally, Mark is a great public speaker! He is very passionate about Splashtop and the power of our product.

Many would agree that one of the world’s greatest public speakers is probably, our Cupertino neighbor, Steve Jobs. Just in case any of you want to brush up on your public speaking skills, here’s an article I found in Business Week where Carmine Gallo analyzed Steve Jobs’ speaking style and boiled it down to a 10-part framework.

Finally, to inspire all of those public speakers out there, here’s a YouTube clip feature Steve Jobs (our neighbor who should invite us over some time) introducing the Macintosh for the first time:

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.

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

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.