5. When we emerged from stealth mode in September, there was a lot of interest in who we were and what we were doing. We posted brief bios of our management team and that post continues to be a very popular one: Meet the Virtual Computer Management Team

4. As we were wrapping up for some much needed time off during the Thanksgiving holiday, we posted about a milestone we were very excited about: First NxTop Beta is Live!

3. Our company launch made it to a popular virtualization blog and we decided to mention it: Virtual Computer Isolates Hardware, OS, Apps and User Data for More Secure Laptop and Desktop Management

2. The public launch of Virtual Computer just before VMworld generated a lot of attention: Virtual Computer Launches

1. Our most popular post of the year was one of our last posts of the year which showed NxTop running two operating systems and each operating system running a 3D graphics intensive program (Google Earth and Quake): 3D Graphics in Virtual Machines Running on a Bare Metal Client Hypervisor [Video]

You can view our full blog archives and keep reading in 2009. We will have more videos, more news of the NxTop launch, articles on technology and other posts talking about things we find interesting. If there’s something you want to see us post or cover, please let us know in the comments.

Happy New Year!

Dan keyed in on an important aspect of our value proposition: the fact that we are building an end-to-end solution that includes both a feature-rich management system and a type 1 (“bare metal”) client hypervisor.  Doing both is hard, but we saw it as the only way to create real value for our customers.  While we are not a consumer technology (yet, anyways), we take our cue from MP3 players.  They existed before the iPod, but it was only when Apple brought together a great management tool (iTunes) that worked seamlessly with a great player (iPod) that downloadable music really took off.

Here is Dan’s take:

Unlike some competitors that focus on the hypervisor and just assume a management system exists that would help the IT administrators manage the encapsulated workloads, Virtual Computer started with the management system and then built a small hypervisor/client management tool.

This approach appears likely to result in a very well managed, optimal environment.

I would like to recognize the two non-profit organizations we worked with, the Greater Boston Food Bank and The Home for Little Wanderers for the important work they do year round and for making it easy for companies like ours to get involved.  A special thanks also to Kyla Kenney from our team for stepping out of the day-to-day chaos around here long enough to make it all happen.

As our company grows, so too will our positive impact on the community.  We have a number of ambitious community outreach plans on the table for 2009, so stay tuned!

But by 2001, the dotcom crash ended his assignment. His most recent job was outsourced this year, leaving him out of work Oct. 17. He joined Virtual on Oct. 20, and in November learned he had passed the exam to become an American citizen.

“In my career,” said Fatykhov, “I’ve been in startups a couple of times, and they didn’t turn out well. But when you look at the management and the market, you understand that this is a dynamic place.”

The Boston Globe came in to our offices a few times over the last couple of weeks, including during our gift swap (that’s Al checking out his gift in the photo accompanying the article), to talk with a few of us and also for a demo of NxTop (which you can see running a few 3D graphics intensive programs in this video).

We still have many mountains to climb in 2009 to get our product to general availability and find buyers in a difficult IT spending climate, but the fact of the matter is that NxTop is a great product that will save IT teams money – a great value proposition in a recession. There is more confidence and optimism around our corridors than there is gloom and doom, and I am glad that the word is spreading.

Our fearless CTO, Alex Vasilevsky, not only came up with a great architecture for fully virtualized 3D graphics, he actually showed up one day with a working proof of concept.  A couple of us decided to put it to the test and run two separate 3D applications (Quake and Google Earth) in two separate virtual machines. As you can see, they are running simultaneously. With NxTop, you can switch between them in an instant while both operating systems are using 3D graphics. By the way, be careful when switching to Google Earth while playing Quake, as you generally get killed pretty quickly when you’re not paying attention to the game.

Check out the video:

1. What are the real business drivers for desktop virtualization?
2. Do virtual desktops need to run on a server?
3. What about PC-hosted desktop solutions that already exist?
4. What will a mainstream desktop virtualization solution look like?
5. Will the end-users be happy with the solution?

Full post is here. It is an interesting read if you would like to understand more about what drives us here at Virtual Computer.

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 are celebrating a major milestone at Virtual Computer this week, as we now have our first NxTop beta customer up and running.  We would like to thank Steve Dale for being the first to take the plunge. He’s the guy on the right who looks like he would think nothing of riding his Harley over to our office to “express his displeasure” if things aren’t working correctly. We have a debate going internally here about whether Mark from our engineering team (left) is really so soft that he needs to wear a winter hat and coat in an air conditioned data center, or if he was just prepared for a quick getaway if the install went south (thankfully, it didn’t).

All joking aside, one of the most rewarding things about working at Virtual Computer has been setting very aggressive goals for ourselves and then working as a team to deliver the impossible. When we first began work on NxTop, our goal of having a working end-to-end product that we could “wow” people with at VMworld in September followed by a beta in November seemed a bit outlandish. We are now two-for-two thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, the innovation and drive of our VP of Engineering, and a CTO with a big idea and an uncanny ability to knock down any technical obstacle in our way.

We have had overwhelming interest in the NxTop beta program, and we will continue to grow our base of beta implementations in the coming weeks and months.  If you have already expressed interested and haven’t heard from us yet, you will soon.  If you haven’t yet expressed interest and would like to, you can do so here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more information on what is another unfortunate example of stolen data and hardware leading to expense and, frankly, embarrassment that could have been avoided.

Our recent post on laptop theft statistics goes into detail on not only how many laptops are stolen and how often (one every 53 seconds – think about that) but also how we are designing NxTop to help companies avoid this problem in the future.