Mainframe2 sends the screen image as an H.264 video stream, so there’s some challenge to encode commands going in one direction, run the app, then send encoded video back. It’s probably there but as an idiot I just don’t care that much and Nikola says it won’t be noticeable by the time the service is widely available. VentureBeat wrote about Mainframe2 an hour or so ago and they complained about latency. If I used Photoshop all day every day of course I’d want my own local copy, but even then I can see emergencies happening where being able to edit on a smart phone might save the day. Need 100 virtual GPUs for your iPhone? Okay.

I don’t even need a powerful computer, since all the crunching takes place in the cloud. I don’t have to worry about keeping the application current. Renting the software I can pay a few dollars rather than hundreds. I use Photoshop maybe six times per year so renting makes a lot more sense than owning. Next Mainframe2 appears to use an application rental model. The apps are (so far) all Windows, but the user can be on a Mac or anything else that supports html5.

And that’s the point, because it’s graphically-intensive apps like video editing that Mainframe2 will be targeting from the start when its service becomes commercially available later this fall. The application code runs across many virtual machines in the cloud and - this is especially important - supports nVIDIA’s virtual GPU standard, so graphics performance is especially strong. Normally moving an app from a PC to a server and then virtualizing it in the cloud is a multistep process that can take weeks or months to get running smoothly but Nikola says Mainframe2 can do the job in about 10 minutes. We’re talking Photoshop and AutoCAD on your iPad. Mainframe2 claims it can put almost any Windows application into the cloud, making apps usable from any device that can run a web browser supporting html5. And as of this week he’s the CEO of Mainframe2 (now called Frame - Bob) , an exciting startup strutting its stuff at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara. He is also the guy who restored from a grotty old VHS tape my film Steve Jobs - The Lost Interview. My friend Nikola Bozinovic (say that three times fast) is a very sharp software developer originally from Serbia who has, over the years, worked for most of the usual suspect American software companies.

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