Watch Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer discuss ways to transform personal computing. Watch Mundie’s keynote on computing at EmTech08. TR: What kinds of programming techniques would be needed to support so many devices and processors running in parallel? CM: Many of the basic tenets of how people write programs and have written them for decades no longer turn out to work very well. T

A San Francisco-based startup called 12seconds is a video version of Twitter, but how useful will it be? In late July, a startup called 12seconds launched an early version of a product that lets people publicly post 12-second-long videos on the Internet about what they are doing. Using a Web camera or a cell-phone video camera, people record themselves doing anything–watching a football game at a

The logo for MobileMe, Apple’s upgrade to its .Mac suite of Web applications, comprises the icons of four of the service’s major features–e-mail, calendar, address book, and photo gallery–floating in a cottony white cumulus. The image announces an elegant, user-friendly take on cloud computing, syncing users’ data wirelessly between Macs and PCs, the Web, iPhones, and iPod touches. Summer storm: T

A new startup hopes to compete in the crowded Web-application infrastructure market by making its platform open source. This week, a startup called 10gen released a preview of its infrastructure software for Web applications, entering a competitive field crowded with startups and the formidable Google, with its Google App Engine. The company received $1.5 million in an early funding round from Uni