Our friends at Asus recently released their Eee Box (pictured above). It’s an Atom-powered nettop box that is the desktop cousin to the Eee PC netbook. The concept is that internet loving consumers need devices that are differently focused then the traditional bigger, faster, better model that PC manufacturers have provided over the last 15 years. What we need is simple, direct-to-web devices that get us what we need/want efficiently.

The Atom processor has been built specifically for this purpose. This is what the Intel website says,

“If you’re a prolific emailer, avid Web surfer or dedicated VoIP user, you may want a computer focused on getting you online. The Intel® Atom™ processor was specifically designed for simple, compact desktop devices—or nettops—that deliver affordable Internet experiences, making it a great choice for people who primarily want to engage in basic online activities.”

Does this sound familiar to you? If you’re a reader of this blog then you probably know that with the text above, Intel has described Splashtop perfectly. Simple, fast, secure, eco-friendly Splashtop gets you just what you want/need.

It’s exciting that the entire PC industry is developing around the web. That statement sounds simple enough and you might be thinking, “obviously.” But it’s not as obvious as you might think. Not long ago the web browser was a new piece of software, not the centerpiece of the computing experience. The Mac I grew up with didn’t have a modem. Windows 95 was launched without a browser. Now, we have entire processors dedicated to devices whose main focus is to access web applications.

It’s the beginning of an enormous sea change. Think about how devices are now conceived, designed and produced. If you were to design an inexpensive device built for every day usage, what would it do? Access the web. Fast, efficient, secure and eco-friendly. Again a perfect fit for Splashtop.

It has been too long since we’ve featured awesome Web 2.0 apps here on the Splashtop blog. We got all caught up on events and awards. This week I want to get back to our roots and our core message.

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

That’s what we’re about. So when I see a great new Web app I’ve got to give it a shout out. Last week I was introduced to a great new application called Presdo. Someone called it “deceptively simple.” Why deceptive? Because it’s a very powerful application. I get very excited when I see a powerful app in a simple package.

This is the basic interface:

Let’s say I type in “have the product meeting with Sergei at 3pm”

This is what I get:

It naturally interprets what you’re trying to do and then provides everything you would need to do with that event. It can email Sergei to let him know. If I provide the basic location it’ll map it for me. If I need a cafe, it’ll suggest it for me. Finally, if I need to export it to another calendar like google calendar or outlook, it’ll make it happen pretty seamlessly. It makes calendaring events kinda fun, actually. It just goes to show you that you don’t need all that desktop software when you have a fully functional web browser.

Take 2 minutes and give Presdo a try. You might just find a new way to calendar all of your events. I’ve been using it a week and I’m hooked.

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 like to try out new services as frequently as possible and see if they’re a good compliment to Splashtop. After all, particular applications are better suited for Splashtop given their purpose. kwiry is a great example of a well suited Splashtop complimentary web application.

Last week I briefly mentioned Jott, an easy way to have voice-based messages translated to text and left for your contacts or yourself. Jott makes it easy to send an email to others while you’re in the car.

kwiry plays in the same general space but has their own set of killer features. kwiry’s strength lies in their ability to allow for SMS-based self-messaging. In other words, you’re in the coffee shop and you hear this great song. You ask the Barista, “who are you playing right now?” She answers, “the Black Keys.” Ten times out of ten I would get my coffee and then forget the name of the artist. Later in the day I would be thinking, “the Black…something. It’s not the Black Crowes. Who was it again?” kwiry solves this problem by allowing you to text yourself “the Black Keys” and then be reminded about it once you power on your PC.

Make kwiry a bookmark in your Splashtop browser and you can get to those reminders instantly. kwiry takes it even further by giving context to your reminders. When you get back to your PC and see “the Black Keys” you’ll get options to listen, purchase, find reviews and even tour dates for the Black Keys. This, of course, works with many different things you might text yourself - not just the Black Keys.

There are other things you can do with kwiry including friending people and seeing their kwiry’s. This can be really interesting as you can see what your friends are thinking about. This feature is similar to Twitter but the content is very different because kwiry is much more reminder-based, not as much micro-blog oriented. Give kwiry a try and let me know what you think.

**Update: For those of you who signed up for Jott last week, I spoke to the guys at kwiry and they actually just launched Jott compatibility yesterday. They’ve got instructions on how to integrate kwiry and Jott so you can send in reminders with Jott and have them go to your kwiry inbox (complete with search results). We like things that play well together : )

Next week, our CEO, Mark Lee will be presenting Splashtop at the Dow Jones VentureOne Summit. Being selected to participate in this event is a great honor. The event happening in Redwood City, CA sounds pretty exclusive and cool.

I noticed that we’re amongst a great group of startups that are presenting. One I like, in particular, is Jott. I found their service recently and thought it was amazing. It’s one of those services that you wonder, “how did they do that?” Basically, you set up an account, give them your mobile number, import your contact list and all of the sudden you’re able to call Jott’s number, tell them a name and then leave an email message for your contact. They transcribe the voice into text and email it to your contact! It’s amazing how accurate it is. You can also leave reminders for yourself and it is all saved on your own personalized Jott page which you can access from your Splashtop Browser. Pretty cool stuff!

Mint is also going to be presenting. I think Mint is like Quicken for the web. It’s a perfect Splashtop web application. You can organize all of your finances in one place and they even help you to save money. The interface is incredible. I use Mint all the time and they are constantly improving their service. I like to use it with Splashtop because if I have a question about finances I can get it in an instant.

A couple other services I have reviewed in the past will also be presenting. You know how I feel about Twitter. I hope someone Twitters the presentation. And then there’s Meebo, the browser-based chat system which is very popular. Good luck, Mark, with your presentation!

There are certain days where I think that I must have one of the best jobs. When I started blogging for Splashtop I was highly encouraged to try out new, cool services that would test out Splashtop in order to find things that would appeal to our loyal community of users. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure out that games fit into this task perfectly. This post will be short because I have to get back to my heavy research on this subject. But, I found a game that I wanted to share with you immediately so that you, too, can heavily research this subject.

The Game is called: Desktop Tower Defense. You can find it on Kongregate, which is a great casual gaming site.

The idea here is that you’ve got your desktop. Your *real* desktop, not your virtual one. You’ve got a bunch of stuff on your desktop including some money. These little creatures that look like evil cells from Fantastic Voyage want your money. In fact, they’re heading right for your dough. So, you’ve got to build a blockade using several types of stationary weapons. As the evil creatures come through your blockade the weapons will fire, thus damaging and eventually killing the creatures. As you pass more levels, you’ll earn more money which will allow you to purchase more weapons. Just don’t let the creatures get to your money or you’ll eventually lose.

The screenshot above is a good strategy hint. I wish I had seen that about two hours ago.

Once again I am reminded that Splashtop can get you to your favorite web applications seconds after you hit the power button. Today my favorite web application is Desktop Tower Defense 1.5 on Kongregate. You should give it a shot. Call it product research.

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.

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!

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.