Founded in 2005, Box.net had the vision of allowing for content management via the cloud.

FORBES: Box.net Gets Juiced by the iPad

Along these lines, last June, Google connected together 16, 000 computer processors into a giant machine vision learning neural net and let them loose on YouTube.

FORBES: Teaching The iPhone To Drive: The Coming Singularity In Machine Vision

But the fact that App.net has started as a niche product belies the much more expansive vision that is behind the service.

FORBES: App.net Just Went From Twitter Clone To A Scale Model Of Something Much, Much More

The implication is that Apple has a huge potential to spread its vision of this style of computing to a large swath of the Net.

FORBES: Apple's Siri: 'The Culmination Of Steve Jobs' Legacy'

Although the budget is nonbinding and isn't likely to become law, it fleshes out Democrats' vision of a plan to reduce the deficit while protecting safety-net programs.

WSJ: U.S. Senate Approves Budget

Net platform, which aims to fulfill a "software as a service" vision: namely, Windows-based cards powering mobile phones -- not considered a good fit for Windows CE -- and Pocket PCs that are connected to Exchange servers.

CNN: Microsoft pushes smart cards