I just accepted a generous blockchain job offer with a fortune 500 company. But they are not interested in building a new blockchain implementation, but rather exploring smart contracts and their possible relevance to their business.
I think the term "smart contract" is a misnomer. Sure, you could write a code similar to one I use:
Store money and confirm that I am alive every year (by means of me sending a transaction to the contract). If I don't send this transaction, all money is released to my daughters account. This looks like a standard contract.
Now, dApps (distrubuted applications) also use "smart contracts" as the backend, but they do so much more than act as "contracts". For example, Golem is a computation market, Augur is a prediction market, etc. There is a whole universe of applications that can be written on Ethereum that do not quite fit under a simple "contract that you can write using a lawyer and some pen and paper" umbrella.
You are about to make an ether purchase. Please keep the attached wallet file safe. It will serve as a cryptographic receipt of your purchase, along with your password.
The password you created and entered on the sale site is the key to your ether so please do not forget it. And please note: there are no mechanisms in place that will enable the Ethereum team to help you recover a lost password. Once it is lost, your purchased ether will be permanently inaccessible.
Please ensure that a main copy and one or more backup copies of this wallet file are stored separately and securely. If you lose access to all copies of your wallet, you will not be able to access your purchased ether and it is not possible for the Ethereum team to reconstruct a lost wallet.
Once you have saved the wallet file from this email to your computer and securely stored multiple copies of it in different locations, you should expunge this email (and any copies of it) from your email system to further ensure that no unauthorized person gains access to your wallet and attempts to crack the password that locks it.
Once the official client is launched with the blockchain going operational (projected to be Winter 2014-2015) you will be able to import the private key stored in the wallet file and start using your ether on the network. And please note that Ether purchased in this sale is not usable on our proof of concept series clients. They use test-ether.