The smart car photos from our Get Smart About Desktop Virtualization program are pouring in. You can see a sample of them to the left or on our Flickr page. Here’s a great collage put together for us by Gary Newman (thanks, Gary!) of the smart car and a few other smart car-sized vehicles at VMworld:

(And, yes, that photo in the bottom center is us being asked to move the smart car!)

Hope everyone’s enjoying the show — if you haven’t stopped by for a NxTop demo yet, you can find us at booth #1940.

Silicon Valley is generally considered to be the center of the startup universe.  However, with its blue chip educational institutions, top notch venture capital scene, and rich computing technology heritage, Massachusetts has quietly played home to some of the most innovative and successful companies the average consumer has never heard of.

Fortunately, there are some great efforts afoot to raise awareness of all of the amazing innovation going on in the Boston area.  Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog (recently relocated to Boston.com) has become required reading for Boston area startups, and the folks over at Xconomy and Mass High Tech also do a fantastic job highlighting the innovative companies on the rise in Massachusetts.  Additionally, while we often catch flack for letting Facebook fly the coop from Harvard to Palo Alto, we have actually figured out how to use social media here on the east coast. 

Case in point is Mass Innovation Nights (MIN), an organization that has emerged as the confluence of Massachusetts high tech innovators, the social networking world, the mainstream media, and the marketplace.  The organization holds monthly events at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation in Waltham (You can’t find a more appropriate location than that!) where the hottest young companies is Massachusetts show off their latest innovations.

This month, MIN will be conducting its first “virtual” innovation night on Wednesday, August 12.  The event will kick-off at 6:30 p.m. on Twitter using the hashtag #MIN5.  (If you are new to Twitter, the MIN site has some good tips and tools for following hashtags.)  From there, the event will evolve into a phone-based “speed dating” style format with the help of some neat technology from past MIN participant BlitzTime.

One of the three rules for the virtual event is to play nice, but we are far too competitive for that at Virtual Computer.  So, we are putting out the challenge to the Boston startup community.  Do you think you have a more innovative product than us?  If so, the stage is set.  Let’s see what you’ve got!  We’ll be in on the virtual event, as well as jockeying for a spot in a future live Mass Innovation Night.  So, you better bring your biggest innovation, because we’ll be bringing NxTop.

…But winning was even better!  It was an exciting week for Virtual Computer as we won two awards in two days:

At the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX) 6^th Annual Technology Awards this past Tuesday, Virtual Computer was awarded the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Promise Award in recognition of our efforts with NxTop.  If you are in the New England area, I encourage you to check out MITX.  It is a great confluence of people and organizations in the technology space focused on understanding “what’s next.”  We’re grateful to both MITX and PWC for the recognition.

On the following night, the Massachusetts Network Communications Council (MassNetComms, for short) held its 2009 Innovators Summit, bringing together some of the hottest companies in New England for a series of panels that quickly turned competitive as the format shifted to tightly time boxed product pitches.  Fortunately, the combination of a great product and the persuasive powers of our VP of Engineering, Peter Marconi, garnered Virtual Computer “Best Product Concept” honors. 

At the end of the day, our success is measured by what we deliver to customers and not by the size of our trophy case.  At the same time, it has been a grueling couple of months around the Virtual Computer offices putting the finishing touches on our latest product release, so it was great to see our team get some much deserved recognition.

As I have described in the past, NxTop makes use of the Xen open source hypervisor to bring bare metal desktop virtualization to traditional PC hardware. Even though we have put a significant amount of our own work into implementing Xen as a bare metal client hypervisor, this effort would have been impossible were it not for the hard work and innovation of the global community of Xen open source contributors.

A couple of times a year, the leaders of the Xen project conduct an in-person event called Xen Summit. Xen Summit is an opportunity for Xen developers and researchers to share new concepts with the broader Xen community. The next event, Xen Summit North America 2009, is coming up in a couple of weeks. It will be hosted by Oracle at their Redwood City, CA headquarters on February 24 and 25.

While some of us will be at VMworld Europe that week taking our medicine from the VMware marketing and public relations machine, our co-founder and CTO, Alex Vasilevsky, will be keepin’ it real out at Xen Summit. Alex has been a long-time thought leader in the Xen community dating back well before his time at Virtual Computer, and he has been helping out with the upcoming Xen Summit as part of the committee that reviewed and approved proposed papers for the event. He’ll be introducing the authors of the various paper submissions and no doubt stirring up interesting conversation and debate throughout the event, so if you are going to be at Xen Summit please do introduce yourself to him. If you tell him you are a loyal reader of the Virtual Computer Blog, he will give you $100 from his own wallet. (Just kidding.)

Visit the Xen community site to learn more or register for the event.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out the report (PDF) that IDC’s Michael Rose did on Virtual Computer’s Series B funding and strategic relationship with Citrix Systems.  Michael is one of a small number of analysts who have been predicting the emergence of client hypervisor technology for quite some time, so when Alex and I showed up at the IDC offices last summer (complete with laser-printed stealth mode business cards in hand), I recall Michael saying something along the lines of, “It’s about time somebody actually did this.”  He didn’t just take our word for it though.  He quizzed us on the finer details of our product for a good two hours during that initial meeting and later followed it up with a visit to our office to see the NxTop in action for himself.

Here’s an excerpt of what Michael had to say in his recent brief:

Although Virtual Computer’s product strategy is based upon the use of a client-oriented version of the Xen hypervisor, it considers itself a desktop management vendor, not a virtualization company. Although this difference may seem like semantics, IDC believes it represents a main point of differentiation between the server and desktop virtualization market. IDC believes that compared to server virtualization, desktop virtualization will be far less disruptive, and that hypervisors will permeate desktop hardware far more quickly and extensively than servers, only a minority of which are virtualized according to our most recent data.

There is also a bit about the potential for a “XenSource-esque” acquisition in the future that gave us all chuckle.  We haven’t had nearly enough fun yet to start looking for the exit, but surely we are worth at least triple that price.  Server virtualization is the easy stuff!  

Download the full IDC report (PDF).

The NxTop beta program we kicked off in November is moving full speed ahead. (Note that unlike with recent posts, I resisted the urge to use either a train or spaceship analogy.) We recently entered Beta Phase 2, which included a software upgrade for our existing beta sites, as well installation of a bunch of new beta sites in the US and Europe.

Another important part of this process has been ramping up our own internal usage of NxTop.  We’ve had our hands on the product all day, every day for quite a while, but there is still a difference between that and “eating our own dogfood” for day-to-day PC usage.

Over the last month or two, we have been making a concerted effort to get as many internal users as possible on NxTop, and we have a reached pretty impressive critical mass of internal NxTop users.  This is not limited to engineers.  My entire product management and marketing team is cut over, and we actually made our sales folks install NxTop Engine themselves on their PCs.  I am thinking we may have a GEICO-esque marketing campaign on our hands: “So easy, even a salesperson can do it!”  (Sorry guys, I couldn’t resist.)

We have been working hard on this product for a while, and it’s a blast to be able to see it in action every day.  It is still a little rough around the edges in places, but it is amazing to see the progress between development releases.  We use Agile development at Virtual Computer, so as internal users or beta testers find bugs or make suggestions, they don’t just go into a black hole.  Fixes and improvements show up every couple of weeks.

I am running a mix of application staples, such as Microsoft Office and iTunes, installed directly into the NxTop virtual machine, as well as my own personal mix of virtualized applications (Skype, Firefox, etc.) layered on top of our shared corporate base virtual machine.  When the time comes to patch Windows, we just patch a single master virtual machine on NxTop Center, and each of our individual NxTop-enabled PCs is updated in the background while we are still using the earlier version.  On the next reboot, we’re fully patched.

If you would like to be added to our beta program waiting list, I encourage you to register on our web site.  You can also sign up to receive general product updates and availability information in the future.

Ever wonder what announcing a $15 million fundraising round in the middle of a recession would do for your web traffic?  It would probably look something like this:

The apex of the chart is Monday and Tuesday of last week, both of which shattered our previous record for daily unique visitors that dates back to our company launch from stealth mode last September.  While I hid the numbers, the baseline traffic we were getting previously was very respectable, so the announcement clearly made a big splash.

The bulk of the traffic to the site last week resulted from the great press coverage our announcement generated.  Kudos to Kyla Kenney, our PR guru, for doing a great job getting the word out to press and analysts, and a thank you to Andy Cohen and the Citrix team for assisting with our press activities.

We have become a bit addicted to watching the web stats go up, so I guess it’s up to us now to keep the excitement about Virtual Computer and NxTop growing.

OK, I don’t break out the Han Solo quotes for just any occasion, so clearly something big is happening at Virtual Computer today. Earlier this morning, we made a major announcement that we just closed a $15 million series B financing round, which is big news in itself given the state of the global economy. However, equally significant is who is investing in the company. Our existing investors, Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners, doubled down on Virtual Computer, and we also welcomed in an exciting new strategic investor, Citrix Systems.

The addition of Citrix as an strategic investor is absolutely huge for us. I have already commented on the significance of the Citrix/Intel client hypervisor initiative and Project Independence and how they collectively stand to revolutionize corporate computing. An industry standard Xen-based hypervisor will dramatically accelerate Virtual Computer’s mission to refine PC management through client virtualization, and having two industry titans like Citrix and Intel throw their weight behind the client hypervisor model will only speed its adoption and acceptance.

Whenever the big guys jump into an emerging new technology area, there is always risk that the innovative startups who were there first will be squeezed on to the sidelines. An investment by Citrix signals that Virtual Computer’s unique vision and collection of important technology innovations have earned us a key seat at the table as these industry developments unfold in the months and years ahead.

With all of the excitement about the Citrix relationship, it is easy to overlook the significance of a $15 million infusion of capital into Virtual Computer. We have already been moving at a very good clip to outrun and outexecute potential competitors big and small, but this additional investment, which brings our total funding raised to date to $21 million, allows us to engage the hyperdrive on our go-to-market plan. It couldn’t have come at a better time as the client hypervisor / PC lifecycle management convergence we have been predicting is clearly heating up.

Traveling at light speed it not easy. As Han warned, without careful calculations you can fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova. However, you can’t win if you are not in the game, and I have to credit our co-founders, Dan McCall and Alex Vasilevsky, for coming up with a winning business plan and technology vision, building a winning team capable of making it a reality, and effectively steering a rocket ship that is moving faster than any of us imagined possible.

I thought it might be fun to start the new year by highlighting our most popular posts of the past year (well, the most popular posts since we started blogging in July):

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!

This holiday season, we wanted to give something back to the community, so we held our first annual Virtual Computer Food Drive and also provided a very nice assortment of gifts to a family in need.  Even though we still have a relatively small team, the generosity of our employees was overwhelming.  Our food collection box was overflowing the day after we launched the drive.  It was also very rewarding to support a deserving family – in our case a couple with foster children – and make their holidays a bit brighter.

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!