Numecent delivers your apps via cloudpaging

One of the exciting new technologies presented at GDC 2012 is Numecent's cloudpaging. This company was found in 1999 by Osman Kent, the co-founder and CEO of 3DLabs, and it promises to revolutionize cloud computing by making the delivery of online software 20 to 100 times faster. Numecent's cloudpaging virtualizes the assets delivered, it divides software into small "pages" that are streamed on an on-demand basis over a secure connection, without requiring you to download unnecessary parts of the program. Interestingly, the technology also allows you to store your user data on your own device.

Numecent has created and patented cloudpaging technology, which “virtualizes the assets delivered. Cloudpaging divides software into small fragments dubbed pages on the servers in a data center. When that fragment is needed by the user, Numecent sends only that fragment on an on-demand basis over a secure connection. The fragment then starts running immediately — in a protected, or sandboxed way — without the need for installation. In customer trials, the company can start deploying a 66-gigabyte virtual machine by fetching only 900 megabytes of data — a 60-fold reduction in time.

“It’s pure freaking magic,” said Jon Peddie, an analyst at Jon Peddie Associates and an expert on graphics technology. “The company has developed a way to quickly download just the necessary parts of a program for it to run, on whatever you are currently working on.”

You can only download software for which you have a license. With a game (Approxy’s domain), the technology would download what you need for opening play. Then, as you progress through the game, those parts, or “pages,” will be downloaded and others removed. When you are finished and close the game, it is no longer stored on your machine and leaves no trace, Peddie said. It can work on a wide variety of devices, including PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

Full details at VentureBeat.