My understanding is following (not sure if correct):
Ethereum is like giant, decentralized computer, for which you can write dapps (decentralized applications). dapps can be anything, decentralized facebook, marketplace, new decentralized currency, decentralized exanged, and many many more. For example, one of the more interesting dapps are
http://www.augur.net/ or
https://etherex.org/ at the moment.
Eth (Ether) is a coin/token used to "fuel" the network. Ppl provide resources (cpu, disk space, ram) for the dapps and enforcing dapps rules on their nodes and get rewarded by Eth (mining basically). Off course they can also pay for dapps services with eth, if they want to. If you run your own dapp on Ethereum network, need to pay for it with Eth.
So in short, bitcoin is decentralized currency, Ethereum is decentralized applications.
[/quote]
Ok that make's it somewhat clearer, especially that augur app looks really cool.
But the smart contracts give me some examples we could use them for.
Also I have read that Microsoft is interested in this coin and helping companies to develop apps for ethereum?