Virtual Computer, a newly minted start-up, is promising to extend the benefits of desktop virtualization to mobile computers.

Right now, that promise, and the company's claim to have some patent-pending technology to turn it into reality, are all you'll learn about the product. Executives declined to talk about details. Investors apparently knew enough to pony up $6 million in first-round funding early in 2008, mainly from Flybridge Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners.

The desktop-virtualization market is in ferment, with plenty of products by players large and small, including InstallFree, Microsoft, and VMware. Most are focused on office-based, desktop PCs, however, not laptops with mobile users on the road or with telecommuters at home.

Top executives for the Westford, Mass., company  are co-founders Dan McCall, president and CEO, and Alex Vasilevsky, CTO. Peter Marconi is vice president of engineering. McCall, originally a software engineer, previously co-founded Guardent, a managed security service provider that was bought by VeriSign in 2004. He also held posts with i-Cube and Shiva.

Vasilevsky has a background in server virtualization: He was co-founder and CTO of Virtual Iron Software, where he was responsible for creating that company's virtualization platform. He held previous posts at Ucentric Systems, Avid Technology, and Thinking Machines. He holds six U.S. and European patents, and is a primary inventor on 16 pending patents. Marconi was co-founder and vice president of systems engineering at Axiowave Networks and before that was co-founder and vice president of hardware at Nexabit Networks and vice president of engineering at CrossComm.

Virtual Computer intends to focus on mobile and distributed enterprise workers equipped with laptops, and use virtualization somehow to improve security and manageability for them, without adding complexity to their "computing experience."

Executives will say only that their software will isolate what are today four tightly linked elements in each laptop: the operating system, applications, user data, and the computer itself.

One possible rival is another start-up, Neocleus, which unveiled in May its Trusted Edge product to secure virtualized clients, including laptops. Its boilerplate sounds almost identical to Virtual Computer's: "Our innovation in virtualization changes the way endpoints work to make them inherently more manageable and secure without impacting the user experience or computing performance. Details of the Neocleus approach are online.