The basic idea is to offer distributed computing to users and companies. You could rent out a portion of the grid or the whole thing. Then when no work is avalible for your computer it will revert to mining until more work is avalible.
From another thread:
We are in the business of building a a world-wide distributed computing service. While today, you can earn money from mining Bitcoins, we want to be able to bring you other scientific computing jobs that will pay as much or higher than the rate of Bitcoin mining.
So, if you’ll help us build out our network, we’ll commit to providing you with profitable work for your idle GPU cycles.
and
1) CoinLab obtained $500k in seed funding in Seattle.