Intel and Cray have been talking this week about building supercomputers with a million cores or brains, but how will all those processors-within-processors work together and communicate with one another and how difficult will it be to write applications that take advantage of all of them?

This is the question that Stanford University hopes to answer with its Pervasive Parallelism Lab, announced on Wednesday.

“Parallel programming is perhaps the largest problem in computer science today,” said Bill Dally, chair of the Computer Science Department.

“[It] is the major obstacle to the continued scaling of computing performance that has fuelled the computing industry, and several related industries, for the last 40 years.”

The problem has arisen because multi-core processors were too expensive until recently for all but high-performance computers, meaning few programmers have developed the expertise to take advantage of their new, affordable abundance.

Stanford says computer scientists fear the progress of computing could stall and that’s clearly a worry for the major microprocessor suppliers - Intel, AMD, IBM, Nvidia, HP and Sun are all supporting the new lab, which will pool the efforts of the university’s leading computer scientists.

It is also not the first initiative of its kind. Intel and Microsoft announced last month  they were investing $20m in research at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  in the same area.

Stanford’s lab has a budget of $6m over three years. The aim is to develop a complete parallel computing system, covering everything from fundamental hardware to new user-friendly programming languages. This could lead to the system doing all the work for developers to optimise their code for parallel processing.

The investors in San Francisco start-up Zivity would prefer to think they are funding the next wave of social networking rather than an online peepshow.

Zivity, which serves up photo-shoots of scantily clad and tastefully nude women for subscribers paying $10 a month, is announcing its second-round funding today and has raised $7m from some prominent venture capitalists.

Founders Fund and BlueRun Ventures are providing the financing for the company founded by Scott Banister and his wife Cyan.

The connection is the online payment service, PayPal, bought by eBay for $1.5bn in 2002. Founders Fund founder Peter Thiel was chief executive, John Malloy sat on PayPal’s board before he co-founded BlueRun and Scott Banister was also a director. Mr Thiel was also an early investor in Facebook and both have invested in Slide, which provides popular social-networking widgets.

“The fundamental investment is in people who can make the seemingly impossible possible and the unlikely likely. We’ve worked together on other things and Scott is someone who has done great things a few times over and he is still a young guy,” says Mr Malloy.

The 32-year-old is a serial entrepreneur and co-founded IronPort, an email security company that Cisco bought for $830m last year.

Mr Banister draws parallels with Zivity – IronPort aimed to challenge the dominance of Sendmail in email, Zivity aims to challenge the dominant advertising model for social networking.

“The subscription model is coming and we are interested in having great content and paying the people that create that content,” he says.

Subscribers to Zivity, which is still in invite-only mode, get their own profile page where they can add their details, friends and status updates, but the focus is really on the models and photographers, with members allowed five votes a month to give to their favourites.

Mr Banister says it is giving an unprecedented 40 per cent of its subscription revenues to the content creators, divided according to how many votes they get. His own wife Cyan, as well as being Chief Strategy Officer, is also one of the topless models eligible for the profit sharing.

“You see stars like Lindsay Lohan appearing nude [as Marilyn Monroe] in New York magazine and getting paid for it, but in this era of self-publishing, women do it on MySpace and see their photos taken down by the MySpace abuse department,” he says.

“There’s a big gap we can bridge here, the models and photographers are really excited.”

Despite soft-porn photos being available in abundance on the internet for free, Mr Banister feels Zivity can still create sufficient interest to be a profitable business.

“We’ve close to 30,000 people on our waiting list to get in, the reaction has been incredible,” he says.

“We’re creating something here that is just not available on other social networking sites and we’re providing an outlet for models and photographers that they’ve never had before.”

A bit like Victor Kiam and his Remington shaver, some bloggers liked the Seesmic video product they tested so much that they decided to buy the company.

Well, almost: a long list of industry “names” has been announced as investors in Loic Le Meur’s hot San Francisco start-up.

They include well-known bloggers Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, Dan Gilmor, Steve Garfield, a video blogger, and Jeff Pulver.

Also investing are Atomico, the investment group of Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, Ron Conway, an early Google investor and Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn founder, among others.

This first round of funding is worth $6m. Seesmic allows users to make videos of their thoughts as easily as adding a comment to a blog post.

It is still in closed alpha, but Mr Le Meur’s clever cultivation of well-known bloggers as testers has garnered Seesmic influential support, plenty of publicity and now, loads of money.

Palm Desert, California: Here at DEMO 08, we have two days of product launches by 77 companies unveiling new web tools and services, hardware, software and the latest in consumer electronics.

Products like the Roomba vacuum cleaner and Pleo the robot dinosaur were introduced at DEMO and the room here is packed with media and venture capitalists watching six-minute demos of the next big ideas.

Some highlights from the opening session:

Iterasi unveiled its "Notarize" web toolbar. This is bookmarking on steroids. Iterasi captures a complete web page when you click on its button. That means not just the link, but an image of the page and a full html version that will render just as you first saw it. This has become more difficult as sites have become increasingly complex with the use of Ajax, but search results pages and annotated maps can be saved as you created them. The page can also be tagged and filed to make it more findable.

LeapFrog, the educational toy company which has sold 30m of its LeapPad platforms worldwide and more than 70m LeapPad books, introduced its new Tag device.  The pen-like peripheral is aimed at helping four to eight-year-olds to read. Pressing on any word or object in Tag-enabled books makes the pen speak the word. It can also be connected to a PC to download words for new books and to upload information on the child’s reading, showing a parent how their child is progressing.

One of the irritations of current mobile phone browsers is that they lack the software capabilities to play video. Skyfire launched a browser for mobile phones at DEMO that can handle Flash, Ajax, Java and Quicktime elements in web pages. The bad news is that is still in private beta and only works on Windows Mobile devices currently. The presenters said users could also listen to last.fm music, and later showed me how other kinds of non-Flash-based internet radio like the BBC could be heard.

The storage company Fabrik showed off Joggle, which it described as "aggregation through virtualisation". Joggle, built on the Adobe Air platform, finds your content whether it is online or offline and presents it in a single view. Fabrik showed a window of thumbnail pictures that were stored on a combination of Flickr, a USB thumb drive and a MyDocuments folder. Content such as photos and music can be dragged into a slideshow creation tool that can then be served as a widget on a users’ blog or MySpace page.

SpeakLike showed an instant-messaging translation service. An English speaker typed in English in his chat window, but his words appeared translated into Spanish in the window of his Spanish friend. The reply in Spanish was translated back into English. SpeakLike also demo’d an English to Chinese conversation. The company uses a mixture of machine translation and human interpreters, which raises questions about how the business will scale and make money.

Finally, Notchup showed off a job recruitment service for people not looking for jobs. The idea is that people happy in their jobs but interested in listening to good offers are the most sought-after recruits. Companies can pay tens of thousands of dollars to headhunters to reach these people, but Notchup cuts out the middleman. Workers enter their CVs and use a calculator for their skills to set a price of say $500 that they expect to be paid to be interviewed. Companies contact them directly although the worker’s anonymity is initially preserved. Notchup says 50,000 people and 400 corporate clients have signed up in the past eight days.

Hidden behind some billion-dollar database-company acquisitions - on what must be a record-breaking day for number of deals in the sector - came a little funding news that could eventually have equal significance for the way we organise our information online.

While Sun was paying $1bn for MySQL, Oracle was buying BEA Systems for $8.5bn and SAP was wrapping up its $7.15bn Business Objects acquisition, San Francisco-based Metaweb received $42.5m in second-round funding led by Goldman Sachs.

Metaweb says its aim is to build a better infrastructure for the web. Its first product is Freebase – “an open, shared database of the world’s information.”

Web sites have been able to provide more relevant and meaningful results for users’ searches in recent years, thanks to XML, which allows more detailed tagging and categorising of information.

Wikipedia is an example of information being organised by users themselves in an even more structured way and Freebase is extending this by drawing on Wikipedia and many other sources for its open database.

It differs from Wikipedia in listing facts and statistics rather than articles on subjects. This rawer format allows others to sort and repurpose the information into new forms on their own web sites. Freebase is also different from Google Base in eliminating any duplication of data and providing a community editing tool.

It is still early days, but Metaweb hopes to make money by serving ads next to the information that Freebase throws up - a model where Google has been rather successful and where Metaweb could become a threat – as well as by charging for some commercial uses of its APIs.

Things may never return to bubble-era levels. But as this chart (from data released by Dow Jones VentureSource) shows, there is something of a boom underway in cashing out VC investments.

Last year, the amount raised from IPOs jumped by 80 per cent to $6.7bn. The number of deals grew by a third and the average amount raised ballooned as Wall Street threw money at young tech companies.

Meanwhile, thanks to some big-ticket deals like Yahoo’s $812m purchase of Right Media and Google’s $625m splurge on Postini, $46bn worth of venture-backed companies changed hands in the M&A market, 45 per cent more than the year before.

As always, the question is: How much of this cash will be recycled straight back into VC investments?

Full marks to Larry Ellison (not to mention Credit Suisse and WR Hambrecht) for their management of the Netsuite IPO, but it seems that sometimes you just can’t plan for Wall Street’s apparent irrationality.

This had all the makings of one of those headline-grabbing IPOs that leaves a company’s early shareholders with an uncomfortable feeling that they have somehow been short-changed. The bankers come up with a price that is meant to give the stock a comfortable ride in the after-market, only to see trading go through the roof. Initial investors are left to wonder how much money was left on the table (this summer’s VMware IPO was the most glaring recent example.)

It seemed that the Dutch auction format used for the Netsuite IPO was going to iron out that effect. In recent days the indicated price range was raised twice, from an initial $13-16. The shares were eventually priced on Wednesday at $26 each. This is a company that is far smaller than Salesforce.com, which has grown far slower than Salesforce.com, and which has yet to prove its business model works - yet the pricing was at a significant premium to Salesforce.com on any measure you care to take.

It looked as though Ellison, CEO of Oracle and controlling shareholder of Netsuite, had called the IPO traders’ bluff. If they wanted to bid up the auction to a dizzy level to assure themselves of an allocation, he was not above hitting the bid and taking the money. When the shares opened on Thursday they settled just above the issue price, despite very heavy trading. Any premium had seemingly gone to the company and its early investors.

So how to account for what happened in the last two hours of trading? Netsuite’s shares eventually drifted all the way up to $35.50, to yield a significant first-day "pop." It seems that, with a shortage of shares in the IPO, there’s just no way to handle the weight of money looking for a home in the "software-as-a-service" sector (Salesforce was also up 8 per cent Thursday.) But when the lock-up ends and Netsuite insiders get to unload more of their shares it should be a different story.

All the discussion about whether or not internet financing is in the middle of another bubble period tends to miss one very important point. Wall Street has not shown much sign of internet excess yet - and with the stock market swinging wildly this week, public market investors are showing no inclination to jump in.

A case in point on Wednesday: the withdrawl of an IPO for social networking company Classmates Media. This is a company assembled through a series of acquisitions over the last three years by United Online. Having welded together social networking site Classmates, online loyalty marketing company MyPoints and a couple of other ventures for a total of $200m, UOL hoped to turn around and sell a small slice of the venture to the public, netting more than $100m in cash and putting a heady valuation on the unit of some $720m.

If Classmates’ track record wasn’t enough to put you off - profits of just $1.7m on revenues of $140m in the first nine months of this year - there were several other red flags. The social networking site earned a "significant portion" of its advertising revenues from a deal that expired last month, and even if it finds a replacement for this it warned that any new arrangement is likely to produce less money. The site’s other main source of income, selling subscriptions, has come under the scrutiny of Federal regulators in the US, who don’t seem happy with its practice of automatically renewing memberships (and charging credit cards) each year. For good measure, there’s also a risk that its email marketing practices - the source of most of its user activity - could fall foul of US anti-spam regulations.

None of this might have mattered much back at the end of the 1990s. In the current climate, UOL has just pulled the offer because of what it called "general market conditions."

Silicon Valley is still trying to party like it’s 1999. But unless Wall Street joins in, the alcohol is likely to run out sooner rather than later.

It must have seemed a good idea at the time. Combine a company that produces an electronic programming guide with one that makes content protection technology, and you get an outfit that is perfectly positioned to help media companies navigate the challenging waters of internet-delivered TV. That is, if you don’t end up with a trainwreck first.

Macrovision’s proposed $2.8bn  purchase of Gemstar-TV Guide may survive the elevator pitch test, but it looks monumentally difficult to make work. For a start, Gemstar will be a very big and complicated dish to swallow. Some 55 per cent of its revenues don’t even come from electronic programming guides, but from the TV Guide magazine and cable channels. Unpicking the pieces, selling off unwanted assets and paying down debt may eventually leave the smaller Macrovision in a position to digest what’s left, but Gemstar has been a playground for intellectual property litigators for so long that it’s hard to imagine this turning out clean and simple.

The shares of both companies haven’t stopped falling since the deal was announced last Friday. Macrovision is down nearly 30 per cent and at $4.44, Gemstar is now trading 30 per cent below the original value of the cash-and-stock deal. For News Corp, which has put its 41 per cent stake in Gemstar behind the deal, it seems a fitting end to a disastrous investment. It’s also a reminder that assembling the next generation of media technology services companies out of today’s complicated patchwork of point-product vendors is likely to be a messy business.

Over on the Left Coast, the turmoil in the New York markets certainly feels a long way away.

In fact, given what’s happening elsewhere, the mood today at one of Silicon Valley’s top financial conferences seems almost complacent (no doubt it owes something to the location, on a remote bluff overlooking the foggy Pacific Ocean.)

And why not? Venture capital worldwide is likely to top $40bn this year for the first time since 2001, and IPO stocks in the US are up 20 per cent since June, compared with a 1 per cent  rise in the Nasdaq. That lubricates a lot of new deals for the financiers and entrepreneurs mingling here.

So it’s a good thing that Paul Wick of J&W Seligman, one of the biggest specialist tech mutual fund investors, was on hand today to cast a cold eye over the good and bad of what’s been happening in the IPO market.

Asked whether he thought any investment banks led better IPO deals than others, he certainly did not shirk the question:

"UBS has underwritten a lot of clunkers," he said, starting with but not limited to Vonage. Then there’s Needham, which "has underwritten lots of crummy companies - [though] they have also on occasion had something everyone has overlooked that has been a diamond in the rough."

Even Goldman Sachs, which he generally credits with backing good companies, does not escape the scorn. "Glu Mobile was a real clunker," he said of the mobile games company whose shares were priced by Goldman at $11.50 in an IPO earlier this year and now change hands for around $5. But then, that should have been an easy one for investors to spot: "The Glu Mobile CEO previously rode 3dfx [Interactive] into the ground."

Then there are the sell-side analysts, who were meant to have cleaned up their act after the scandals of the dotcom bubble.

"The sell-side has gotten worse and worse over the years in sucking up to the VCs and sucking up to the public companies," according to Wick. "It’s really quite disturing." He points to coverage of companies like Data Domain, whose rising stock prices seem to be an excuse for analysts to simply raise their price targets higher.

"As you get close to the 6 month lock-up date [for Data Domain], suddently everyone’s target prices have crept up," he complains. "It’s really bothersome for those of us trying to navigate the public markets. What we see happening, the sell-side totally ignores the fact that there’s a ton of competition coming at them in 2008, a lock-up expiration is coming. We’re supposed to just hang on to these things - and buy more."

For good measure, Lise Buyer, a former sell-side analyst who masterminded Google’s IPO, had this to say about the latest crop of new internet companies: "Putting a double vowel in the name of a company doesnt actually guarantee a better valuation." You have been warned.