It’s hard to keep up with all the great new devices out there by OEMs who are doing truly innovative things to make the consumer experience better and better. Every day I drool at all the shiny new devices featured on my favorite gadget blogs. It’s nice to see Splashtop showing up on more and more of them. We’re excited to announce a couple of new OEMs using Splashtop to bring instant internet to millions more consumers out there. This week we get to debut two! One by Acer and another by Sony.

The AspireRevo by Acer

This is a great device! This is, of course a growing category - that of the nettop. Nettop gets its name from Netbooks and is the Desktop equivalent. Thus, it’s a great value in a convenient package. I’ve seen a bunch of reviewers stick this thing right on their TV. It features some amazing hardware, some hot design and, of course, Splashtop. On the AspireRevo Splashtop is called, “RevoBoot.” Check it out more here.

Sony Vaio NW Series

Sony makes beautiful notebooks. I remember my very first Sony Vaio - it was super small, thin, light and felt like a piece of science fiction. Sony has continued a great tradition of building awesome, consumer and business focused notebooks that often excel in design and functionality. Just as with Acer we’re very proud that Sony has included Splashtop on a platform such as this. It’s cool to think of consumers powering on Splashtop under the famous Vaio logo.

Although Splashtop is on millions of computers already, instant-on is still a new thing, and we often get asked about how and when people use Splashtop. So we thought we’d share some user stories. Take a look at this photo:

(thanks @chiropractic from http://www.adiola.com for letting us use your photo!)

As you see, this chiropractor in the sunny Los Angeles has an ASUS EEE Box with Splashtop running in his office. You’re probably wondering why would a chiropractor do that. Turns out that he wants to give his patients access to the Internet while they are waiting. He told us: “it’s great for giving public access to net w/o getting on our office network. Runs silent too.”

Besides being instant-on (or off), Splashtop protects the PC from… its users’ inadvertent mistakes. With Splashtop, you aren’t going to break your PC, infect it with malware, or accidentally erase some important file. Of course, you can still spill coffee on the keyboard, but you get the point: no maintenance. And you do not need a Computer Science degree to set it up - it comes pre-installed on the computer.

As for “runs silent”, Splashtop will save you energy, since you can turn it on and off quickly. No need to keep the PC running while you are… working your chiropractic magic. But kudos to ASUS and Intel for designing this energy efficient nettop with the Atom processor.

If you have your own Splashtop stories or photos, we would like to hear about them! You can give me a quick message over at Twitter, @kevintu, or just shoot me an email kevin.tu AT devicevm.com

Yesterday Intel announced that they were buying Wind River, a big name in the embedded OS market whose software shipped on everything from cars to the Mars Rover. Trying to sort out what the acquisition means, I asked a few questions to our CEO, Mark Lee. Before starting OSA (acquired by Avocent) and DeviceVM, Mark had spent 8 years at Intel - so he would know.

Q: Mark, why did Intel buy Wind River?
A: Intel is smart to look to move up the value stack, but the purchase of Wind River is questionable. A software business is about the people, the talents. Wind River’s expertise is largely around VxWorks, a proprietary OS that continues to lose ground to open source Linux. The embedded software business model is complex, since Wind River serves many different verticals. There are lots of professional services and complex licensing schemes. Intel’s business model is about scalability. The two don’t jive well together.

Q: WindRiver was also refocusing on Linux, wasn’t it?
A: Yes, but there are many stronger Linux players who have no legacy baggage. Intel has been evangelizing Moblin Linux to different Linux OSVs, like Novell, Ubuntu, Xandros, Red Flag - including Wind River. Now the company in effect is competing with these partners - Intel calls them “fellow travelers”. Ironically, out of all Moblin OSVs, Wind River is the only one without any major netbook or MID OEM wins.

Q: What do you think of the ecosystem impact of the Wind River acquisition beyond Linux players?
A: The majority of Wind River’s silicon partners are non-x86: ARM, MIPS, PPC, Sparc, etc. They are Intel competitors. It is hard to see any of these companies continuing to work with Wind River. Much of Wind River non-x86 revenue and customer base will likely go away. I don’t know nor see any non-x86 device manufacturer will move to Intel Atom just because Wind River is optimized for Atom. If more devices move to Atom, it will be on the hardware merits of Atom, and because of the expanding success of Linux overall. With our Splashtop, for example, we are building a great instant-on Linux platform to make Atom more successful.