Some of the smartest ideas in technology are also the hardest to explain until you actually see them in operation. Adobe’s ‘Apollo’ technology, which made its debut at the Demo conference today, is a case in point.

Adobe describes Apollo as "the code name for a cross operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills in HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, Flash and Flex in order to build and deploy rich internet applications to the desktop."

Roughly translated, I think that means Apollo enables developers to build really cool applications that combine the best features of online services like eBay, MySpace and Google Maps with offline desktop applications to create dynamic, interactive services beyond the constraints of a traditional web browser.

In effect users get the interactivity of the web with the performance of the desktop with Apollo providing the bridging technology between the two.

The demo Adobe gave on stage was of a dynamic eBay software package that ran on a desktop but pulled in real-time information from the online auction service and combined it with analytical tools, like an Excel spreadsheet. All in all, it certainly looked pretty impressive.

Adobe (and incidentally eBay) looks like it has a winner - if only the company can find a better way to explain what Apollo does.

Demo 07, the technology showcase where start-ups deliver six-minute pitches to would be investors, potential partners and the media is off and running here in Palm Desert, Southern California.

Second up on stage was Zink, a technology spinout from the old Polaroid instant photo company. Zink, which stands for ‘zero-ink’ has developed a new way to print full colour digital images without the need for ink cartridges or ribbons. The secret sauce is in the special paper that uses proprietary formulated layers of colour-dye crystals embedded in the paper that change from white to one of three basic colours – yellow, magenta and cyan – when a precise dose of heat is delivered by a low-cost thermal print head. The resulting prints are bright, high quality and durable..

Zink believes the first application for the new technology will be to enable camera phone and digital camera owners to carry a small business-card scanner around in their pocket, load up packets of 10-sheets of Zink paper and liberate some of those 300bn images that would otherwise probably never see the light of day.

Zink’s founders claim the price of the resulting prints will be about the same as regular ink-jet prints and that pocket-sized printers should cost around $100.

So, you’re not rushing out to buy Windows Vista? Why should you? It’s only an operating system, and that’s about as exciting as plumbing.

Judged as plumbing, though, it’s easy to forget what a big deal this is for Microsoft. Deep in the guts of Vista are some pieces of the technology that will play a key part in its longer-term battle against Google et al. They include the drably-named Windows Presentation Foundation (once known by the codename Avalon, and the first overhaul of the Windows graphics technology in 15 years) and Windows Communication Foundation (the subsystem formerly known as Indigo, which lets applications "talk" to each other when they are running on different machines.)

Why does this matter? Well, through the new APIs (application programming interfaces) to these technologies, Microsoft is giving developers the chance to build applications that run smoothly, and look great, even when they are running over a network and working on many different kinds of devices. Remember, Microsoft is first and foremost a platform company, and these are important building-blocks of a Web-based computing platform that extends well beyond the PC. They are showing up first in Vista, but the same building blocks will be embedded in the Windows Longhorn server software when it comes out later this year, and in future Microsoft services over the internet.

Microsoft’s bet is that the sort of "computing in the cloud" represented by Google will always be an incomplete picture. Only the company that spans PCs and other "client" devices, servers and services (ie, Microsoft) can stitch it all together. When it comes to the best way to meet a particular need through software, or the best way to charge for it, there will be "many ways to mix and match," Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategies, tells me: it will depend on the task at hand and how the user wants to pay for it.

"The world will be a giant mash-up of software and services," says Fitzgerald.

We’ll see. By finally launching Vista, though, Microsoft has at least been able to make what it considers an important move in the longer-term chess game against Google.

When Xbox 360 games come with fries, they tend to sell faster.

That’s the empirical evidence from Burger King’s second quarter earnings announcement that it sold 3.2m Xbox games in a six-week period over the holiday season.

The games could be bought with a BK value meal and their $3.99 price tag would have been easy to swallow, compared to the $60 often charged for next-generation titles.

The fact that the three budget games Sneak King, Big Bumpin’ and Pocketbike Racer featured BK icons such as the king himself was less palatable.

But the promotion will certainly have set video games publishers thinking – it doesn’t take massive promotion and a Gears of War to sell a million these days, just make sure the price and the food are appetizing.

Analysts appear underwhelmed by Intel and IBM’s simultaneous announcements of the biggest chip breakthrough in 40 years.

Joe Osha at Merrill Lynch says Intel and others have been talking about using high-k dialectric materials in next-generation 45-nanometre technology for years, so the accomplishment is no surprise.

What is more interesting, he argues, is how many companies are likely to stay in this race to build smaller-scale chips as the technology becomes more challenging in the move from 45nm to 32nm and beyond.

He has a point. Texas Instruments announced last week in its earnings report that it would be pooling its resources with its Asian foundry partners in future research. IBM has also developed research partnerships with Toshiba, Sony and AMD.

Intel seems intent on ploughing a lone furrow. This is giving it a manufacturing lead at present – it will be first to market with 45nm chips, beating AMD by perhaps a year.

The question is whether this will translate into market-share gains. Its lead in the current 65nm generation suggests it might, with the cheaper manufacturing process making it better able to compete in a price war with AMD.

The Nintendo Wii’s motion-sensing controller helped create a new market for accelerometers, most commonly used to deploy airbags and part of the product group known as Mems (microelectricalmechanical systems).

STMicroelectronics, Europe’s biggest chipmaker, has just created a standalone division for Mems for what its director, Benedetto Vigna, describes as an era of consumerisation of the technology.

He told us today he expects the success story to continue with the gyroscope – not that large spinning wheel on an axis, but a silicon chip version, activated electrically and disturbed in a range of only 10 to 100 atoms to detect side-to-side movement and orientation.

The PlayStation 3’s controller has an accelerometer and a gyroscope, making it more sophisticated than the Wii, but Sony has yet to exploit all the possibilities through software.

STMicro sees a big market in mobile phones for these Mems devices. Camera phones that need image stabilisation can benefit from accelerometers and gyroscopes combined. STMicro says its solution can be just 1mm thick, much smaller than standard piezoelectric sensors, while being cheaper and consuming less power.

Other applications include scrolling through Web pages or maps by just tipping the phone, location-based services and even a pedometer application that calculates distances walked and calories used.

Pictures on a handset can switch from portrait to landscape mode automatically as it’s rotated and silencing the phone in a meeting can be as simple as turning it face down and tapping it.

STMicro’s biggest market right now is computers, with around 30m laptop hard drives equipped with “free-fall” technology that “parks” them to avoid data loss if the notebook is dropped.

Fora.tv is one of the latest entrants onto the online video scene, and for policy wonks, it is also bound to be one of the most intetesting. Founded by a veteran of C-SPAN, the non-profit cable channel that broadcasts live Congressional sessions and other public affairs events in the US, Fora.tv hopes to offer visitors access to online videos of speeches that take place around the world each week.

C-SPAN is well-known for inducing yawns across a wide cross-section of the American public, but its unvarnished presentation of policy material remains popular among a small population of news junkies. Brian Gruber, Fora’s president and CEO (and C-SPAN’s marketing director in the 1980s) hopes to  tap into this same vein of enthusiasm, but with Web 2.0 bells and whistles.

Fora has built a slick video player that allows viewers to cut directly to the parts of a speech they are interested in. A handful of speeches even have interactive transcripts that allow users to search for a specific word or phrase which, when clicked on, causes the video to skip to that exact spot in the video - a useful feature for navigating hour-long speeches and roundtables.

Fora, which is backed by William R Hearst III, scion of the West Coast publishing family and a partner at Kleiner Perkins, has yet to receive its first round of VC funding. But it has struck content deals with a host of mostly non-profit institutions, including London’s Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and yes, C-SPAN.

Mr Gruber acknolwedges that Fora’s more serious programming isn’t the usual internet fare, or, as he describes it, "19 year-old girls running up a hill in wet t-shirts being tackled by guys who then go skateboarding." It is still early days, but Fora could well prove compelling for journalist, policymakers, academics and other public affairs geeks that inhabit the ‘long tail’ of internet users.

When it comes to Microsoft’s struggling internet business, Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell is beginning to sound like a broken record. This is what he said today of yet another poor quarter’s results from the online services division:

We’re clearly not happy with that. We continue to take a long-term view of the business and to invest in it.

More than a year after turning on AdCenter, its challenger to the Google and Yahoo! search advertising systems, the best Microsoft can do is scrape together a 5 per cent growth in internet revenues in the latest quarter. Profits have evaporated, turning into a $155m loss.

Mr Liddell promises that Microsoft will finally get its search monetisation engine working by the end of this year: revenue per search by then will be back to where it was a year ago, he says. But Microsoft’s share of the search business continues to dwindle, and at $624m its revenues from the internet in the latest quarter were only 8 per cent higher than four years before. In "Google time", that amounts to an aeon of lost opportunity. By the time it’s ready to fight with Google toe-to-toe, will it already be too late?

Before they get too deeply into their next thing, maybe Skype’s founders should  start paying a bit more attention to matters of a more pressing pecuniary nature. To wit: the $1.5bn they stand to pick up if their internet telephony business hits its financial targets under new owner eBay.

To judge by the latest results, that payday could be in danger. eBay says it has fallen behind on its plans to "monetise" Skype (though useage grows by leaps and bounds - but then, the service is largely still free, so why wouldn’t it?)

Speaking to the FT after announcing otherwise stellar results this week, Meg Whitman was insistent that Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have not taken their eye off the ball.

"They’re very engaged, in particular Niklas," who is working pretty much full time still on Skype, she said. "He is highly motivated by the earn-out, it’s a big chunk of money. It’s a three-year bullet: they either get it or they don’t."

The problem, according to Ms Whitman, is not that the methods eBay hopes to use to make money out of Skype are not working. Rather: "We just didn’t try them. We were otherwise engaged."

Zennstrom and Friis were given three years to make their big bonus, and it’s already nearly a year and a half since the deal with eBay was announced. The clock is ticking.

Chipmaker Broadcom deserves an honourable footnote in the options backdating scandal for yesterday’s eye-popping revelation that it under-reported its compensation costs by $2.67bn (you have to dig into the fine print to find this full cost, which is higher than most news outlets reported.) That has been followed today by a 4 per cent bounce in the company’s stock. So should anybody actually care about any of this?

Not according to Broadcom, it seems. In a filing with the SEC, it wears the massive size of the option charge as a badge of honour, since:

It … reflects Broadcom’s focus on providing entrepreneurial incentives to its employees, which resulted in a much higher ratio of equity to cash in its compensation program, as compared with those of other, more mature technology companies.

Unabashed, CEO Scott McGregor then tries the opposite tack, minimising the damage by pointing out that only a third of the backdated options were ever exercised or remain outstanding (presumably the two-thirds of the options that were underwater and expired worthless weren’t particularly conducive to the company’s ballyhooed entrepreneurial culture.)

It would be interesting to calculate how much of Broadcom’s profits between 1998-2005 (when the extra options costs should have fallen) would have been wiped out by these charges. Only, it didn’t make any profits. Thanks to the tech bust and another inconvenient accounting charge (to write off goodwill from acquisitions), it actually accumulated losses of nearly $6bn. Like many Valley companies, Broadcom has now shifted more of its compensation from options to restricted stock, so maybe things will get a little less volatile from here - even if the entrepreneurial incentives are not quite so compelling.