On Friday at GEL 2009, I met Thomas Deng, a co-founder of DeviceVM which makes Splashtop. Then on Saturday, I noticed a ZDNet story on Techmeme about Presto. Both Splashtop and Presto are so-called instant-on solutions which are essentially miniature Linux distros that boot in a couple of seconds and give you a web browser with Internet access and a few other goodies. My comment to Thomas was something like “that’s impressive” when I found out how many PCs had shipped with Splashtop. But then...

On Friday at GEL 2009, I met Thomas Deng, a co-founder of DeviceVM which makes Splashtop. Then on Saturday, I noticed a ZDNet story on Techmeme about Presto. Both Splashtop and Presto are so-called instant-on solutions which are essentially miniature Linux distros that boot in a couple of seconds and give you a web browser with Internet access and a few other goodies. My comment to Thomas was something like “that’s impressive” when I found out how many PCs had shipped with Splashtop. But then...