As loyal readers of Brian Madden’s blog, we have really enjoyed the new Brian Madden TV series that he and cohort Gabe Knuth started up back in February. It is clear that the acquisition of The Brian Madden Company by TechTarget hasn’t diluted the depth and independence that longtime readers appreciate and has in fact freed up more of Brian and Gabe’s time to focus on new types of independent content like Brian Madden TV.

We were quite excited that while Brian was in the Boston area for one of the TechTarget desktop virtualization roadshow events, he took time to visit our office to do a deeper dive on NxTop and shoot some footage for Brian Madden TV. The highlights appeared on this week’s episode of Brian Madden TV.

There is a lot of talk these days when it comes to NxTop, and Brian shot a ton of additional footage while he was here. So, keep an eye on his site for the extended version in the coming weeks for extra NxTop demo goodness.

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!

Our view from day one has been that by running virtual machines directly on traditional PC hardware rather than remotely on servers, we can deliver the manageability, reliability, and security benefits of desktop virtualization while providing a better end-user experience.  Graphics performance is quite literally the most visible aspect of the user experience, so it is a major area of focus for us.  We have great 2D graphics working in our beta deployments today, but we won’t be satisfied until we have 3D graphics performance that is not discernable from a native operating system installation.  We don’t want to “cheat” (and open up a big security hole) by allowing a graphics driver in Windows to bypass the hypervisor.  We want to do it all in virtualization.

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: