Eric Schmidt Joins The New Advisory Board At Cloud Rendering Company OTOY

OTOY, a company building rendering technology for running games and other applications in the browser, is announcing a new board of advisors, including Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt.

“Six years ago, in an interview with the New York Times, I predicted that 90 percent of computing would eventually reside in the web based cloud,” Schmidt said in an emailed statement. “OTOY has created a remarkable technology which moves that last 10 percent – high-end graphics processing – entirely to the cloud. This is a disruptive and important achievement. In my view, it marks the tipping point where the web replaces the PC as the dominant computing platform of the future.”

OTOY co-founder and President Alissa Grainger said the board is being formed now to “guide us as we grow OTOY and enter the commercial phase of our business.” Some of its members were already involved in OTOY as investors — namely famed Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel and writer/investor George Gilder. The advisory board also includes Schmidt, former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich (Mozilla has partnered with OTOY), and longtime IBM executive Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

As far as I can tell, TechCrunch first wrote about OTOY way back in 2008, so it’s been a long road to commercial deployment. But then, Otoy has a pretty big vision (as indicated by Schmidt’s comment) — using its Octane Render technology to make it possible to run almost any application on any device.

And just to be clear, this news doesn’t affect OTOY’s governance structure at all. Grainger said the board of directors (i.e. the board has formal decision-making power) still consists solely of co-founder and CEO Jules Urbach.

[Photo via Flickr/Charles Haynes]