Last week, we were asked via Twitter to describe NxTop. Immediately, we thought: “No problem. We can talk about NxTop all day.” Of course, on Twitter, you don’t have all day. You have 140 characters. Here’s what we came up with:

Centralized 1-to-many mgmt of virtual desktops, local execution on bare metal client hypervisor, including laptops

That gives a nice overview of NxTop in just 115 characters. I think the one addition is that NxTop does what it does in a unique way. NxTop separates the main components of a PC: the hardware, the operating systems, user data and applications.

The limit on Twitter was useful to us. Since we can talk about NxTop in detail for as long as you’ll give us, it’s nice to be able to step back and provide a clear, concise overview. Twitter really is the new elevator pitch.

If you have a question for us, you can ask it here on the blog, via Twitter or on our forums. We’d be glad to answer it in 140 characters or less.

We’ve been following the trend of laptop and desktop shipments over the past year and knew that it was only a matter of time before laptops overtook desktops in number of units shipped and purchased.

This is, of course, part of the reason we’re focusing NxTop’s capabilities on laptops – when half of your potential customers are using a particular device, you better make sure you work on it.

Well, what we expected has happened: IDC has released a new study showing that laptop shipments overtook desktop shipments for the first time in Q3. From the IDC press release:

The third quarter of 2008 (3Q08) saw notebook shipments into the U.S. market surpass 50% share, topping quarterly desktop PC shipments for the first time in the history of the industry. The share of notebooks shipped in the U.S. in 3Q08 stood at a solid 55.2%, according to preliminary figures from IDC’s U.S. Quarterly PC Tracker.

The 55% ratio was made possible by a record volume of notebooks shipped in 3Q08 – over 9.5 million units – representing more than 18% growth both year over year and on a sequential basis, according to IDC’s preliminary data. These figures were reached amid a relatively active back-to-school season and the burgeoning financial crisis, which captured headlines but did not immediately affect the PC market’s performance.

The full article is available on IDC’s website.

Another busy day at VMworld – once again, thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to watch a demo and talk to us. We know there’s a lot going on at the show and appreciate everyone taking the time (and if you haven’t stopped by, we’re in booth #562 and would love to show you a live NxTop demo)!

Some coverage from the show:

SearchVMware.com / TechTarget stopped by and wrote some kind words about us:

VMware not the first

VMware, however, is the Christopher Columbus of the hypervisor-based virtual desktop approach. Just as Columbus wasn’t really the first to discover America, VMware wasn’t actually the first to come out with this particular idea. I met with a smaller company, Virtual Computer, on the VMworld floor today. Virtual Computer had also announced its product the day prior. NxTop — which is almost identical to vClient — stands out for one big reason: It’s here, at VMworld, and you can see it in action today. VMware has yet to  demo vClient.

Dan Kusnetzky, as part of an overall blog entry on desktop virtualization, said:

Virtual Computer was demonstrating their own approach to a highly managed, highly secure VDI-based solution. Their technology was interesting in that it allowed each of the layers of technology making up a desktop solution (application, data, personalization and underlying operating system) to be managed from a common repository.

Gotta run – more later if I have time.

Greetings again from VMworld in Las Vegas. Before I head out to the first full day on the tradeshow floor, I wanted to thank everybody who stopped by our booth last night during the Welcome Reception. I didn’t get a count of how many people stopped by but I know that we gave away a lot more of our freebies than we thought we would on the first night! (If you want a chance at a something, stop by before we run out.)

For those of you not at the show, VMworld opened for a preview night (essentially, registration and a welcome reception). During this reception, attendees snack and drink while walking around the show floor getting to know who’s there and helping them plan out the rest of the week.

In my experience, early peeks at the show floor are fairly slow and that’s what I expected this time around. Boy, was I wrong! Our booth was packed from opening until after closing – we made sure to hang around the booth until we got a chance to talk to everyone who stopped by.

If you’re at VMworld, be sure to stop by booth #562 to see a live demo of NxTop and to take our Atari/Wii Bowling Challenge (we have a vintage Atari 2600 in the booth). You may walk away with a some stylish freebies!

I see that laptop sales helped drive some nice profit numbers for HP.

No surprise, really. Companies are starting to (or are continuing to) buy laptops for employees instead of desktops since laptop costs have gone down and workers are increasingly mobile. Lower costs, higher productivity and happier employees is a great combination.

Are you using a laptop at work? Still using a desktop?

Over this past weekend, I was working remotely. I think it’s great and convenient that I can take my laptop with me on the go and get a bit of work done pretty much anywhere there is an internet connection (home, a coffee shop, some restaurants and a few places around me even have free public access). Unfortunately, I had trouble accessing our VPN, so some files I needed to access that aren’t on my local system were just out of my reach.

You see, I don’t keep everything on my laptop just in case. There are some files with sensitive data that I can’t risk losing or having someone else get their hands on if, say, my laptop was stolen. These files sit on our network. I can usually access everything no problem but that wasn’t the case this weekend.

This is the downside to working remotely — not having 100% of the files and information I need to get work done. There are alternatives but those don’t always work (for example, I couldn’t FTP into our servers to grab what I needed because port 80 wasn’t open on one of the wireless connections I was using).

Tom Valovic over at Virtualization Review is talking about the user experience today and how the IT industry often overlooks the end user experience when innovating, while other industries pay close attention to the user experience when innovating (for example, the auto industry).

Tom, I couldn’t agree more. The user experience is incredibly important to any product and you hit it spot on when you say it’s necessary to ”improve the end user experience (and not just the IT manager experience.)” It doesn’t matter what part of the industry we’re talking about — desktop virtualization or something else — a product needs to be designed with the end user in mind. Even the best software with an ideal IT interface can fail if the end user adoption isn’t there.

In fact, a poor end user experience can create more problems for an IT administrator than a slick IT interface can solve.