Startup Nivio Offers Virtual Windows Desktop to Tablets, Phones
Nivio, which provides a virtualized Windows desktop to tablet, phone, and PC users, launched Thursday for a low monthly cost.
Nivio, which provides a virtualized Windows desktop to tablet, phone, and PC users, launched Thursday for a low monthly cost.
Beginning around Feb. 14, the service will launch at $15 per month for a Windows 7 environment. Students and children will pay much less, however: $5 per month, and even less if they want to purchase applications.
The service, which launched Thursday, will support Android phones and tablets running OS version 3.0 and above (along with some 2.x devices), the iPhone 4 and above, both iPads, plus Macs, PCs, Linux, and even the Google OS Chromebooks from Samsung and others.
In the emerging world of virtualized Windows desktops, Nivio provides a slightly different model than the existing .
Nivio, by contrast, charges for the time and applications that users access. For example, a user can choose to pay just $5 per month for ten hours of Windows access, or $2/mo for students and children. But users will also pay for access to applications that aren't bundled with the basic operating system. Nivio will charge users $15 per month to use Office, for example, although students and children will be charged just $2, according to Sachin Duggal, one of the company's co-founders.
Each account also comes with 10 Gbytes of cloud storage, which can be synced with the user's other machines virtually instantaneously, Duggal claimed. Nivio also saves state within apps.
Nivio also showed off an app store, where users can instantly install third-party apps. "[Apps] that you would expect to be free are free," such as Adobe Acrobat, Duggar said, with the company charging varying prices for other applications.
"Today we added Yammer, Evernote, and Twitter clients," Duggar said. "Today we have 120 apps, and our goal is 5,000 over the next 16 months." The company has developers in New Delhi, Romania, Moscow, and Palo Alto, among others.
Duggar said that he sees Nivio working hand-in-hand with traditional thin clients; for example, the company is partnering with Wyse for its iOS and Android clients, he said. PPTP VPNs "work perfectly," Duggar claimed, with L2TP needing the enterprise to enable firewall traversal.
Encryption is based on a simple username and password and 1-way hash. A premium service will enable "face recognition," where the user identifies a familiar face from a matrix, plus an SMS token as additional authentication, Duggar said.