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Fisker Automotive said that it is still on target to release its plug-in hybrid high-end sports sedan by the end of 2009.

Tesla’s communications manager on Monday said that the company will not pursue the case because the arbitrator’s ruling was binding.

Fisker Automotive said on Monday that an arbitrator found an interim award in favor of Fisker Automotive and the auto design company which had done work for Tesla last year.

According to Fisker, the case’s arbitrator said that “Tesla’s assertion of violations of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act by Fisker were baseless and neither brought nor pursued in good faith.”

The case dates back to April of this year, when Tesla Motors filed a suit against famed designer Henrik Fisker’s design firm for allegedly taking confidential design information about Tesla’s upcoming luxury sedan during a consulting engagement.

Fisker Automotive responded in May when it filed for arbitration. The contract between Fisker and Tesla had a clause that required that any disputes be handled through arbitration in Orange County, Calif., within 90 days, according to Fisker. Tesla filed its suit against Fisker in San Mateo Superior Court.

The Tesla representative said the result does not affect Tesla’s operations. The company raised $40 million in convertible debt on Sunday in an effort to improve its low cash position and accelerate sales of its Roadster electric sports car.

Electric
car company Tesla Motors will not continue its trade secret suit against rival car maker Fisker Automotive, following an arbitrator’s ruling in Fisker’s favor.

(Credit:
Animoto / CNET)

Paying pro users can now create full-length videos, while everyone can download their creations for viewing offline.

The app also lets you download any videos you’ve created directly to your phone for offline viewing, which means you can play them back even if you’re in the depths of a concrete bunker. This is by far the most important feature in an app like this, and something that should have been included in the very first version.

Future versions of the app may allow non-pro-users of Animoto to create one-off, full-length slideshows on their phones with in-app micropayments–something that’s arrived with iPhone OS 3.0. However, that could take an additional paid version, since apps that started out as free cannot include Apple’s in-app payment system. In the meantime, this version makes Animoto’s $30 annual paid premium service a little more enticing for users who already have an iPhone.

Animoto, the DIY-music-video-meets-slideshow tool, has released a new version of its iPhone app that brings it a little closer to its desktop counterpart.

Users of its paid premium service can now create and watch full-length videos right on their phone. Previously, users (both free and paid) were limited to 30-second clips consisting of just 16 shots. The new version allows you to create versions of as many as you want–or at least whatever photos can fit inside the length of the song you’ve chosen.

Anything you create on the
iPhone can now be shared through Animoto.com and vice versa. So, if you’ve created something neat on your computer that you want to share while out and about, you now can. The app denotes videos made on the site with little A’s that get stuck in front of the filename. And back on Animoto’s site, there’s now a special section in your videos list that separates the videos you’ve made on your phone into their own section.

At EMI, employees used Exchange Calendar, which uses a “painful remote-access methodology,” he said in a keynote speech on Tuesday at the Black Hat security conference.

“I’m for well though-out projects to promote innovation,” John Johnson, a senior security program manager at tractor maker John Deere, said during a chief security officer panel discussion.

“Humans are like rats. If you make it easy for them to get through the maze, they will,” Merrill said, acknowledging that the cynical viewpoint would likely end up as the main quote in news stories. (Sorry Doug.)

But “it’s not security’s responsibility to go out there and say, ‘Users want to use Gmail. Let them use it,’” Johnson added. “If we decide to use Gmail, we need to have a project and treat it in a formal way and pay money to do it right.”

Meanwhile, companies need to design security systems that will more readily and easily be used by people, and that eliminate the chances for human error.

It turns out, the feature gets a lot of users, as people realize that information can help protect them, he said.

LAS VEGAS–You can take the man out of Google, but you can’t take Google out of the man.

That innovation should be fostered by companies by allowing employees to work on their own projects. (Sound familiar? Google lets engineers work 20 percent of their time on special projects of their own design.)

“It’s just a lot easier to use,” he said of the free Web-hosted calendar his former company offers.

At least one IT security manager at the show disagreed with Merrill’s liberal attitude about security and the work environment.

“Humans are like rats. If you make it easy for them to get through the maze, they will.” –Douglas Merrill

While working as chief information officer and vice president of engineering at Google from 2004 to 2008, Douglas Merrill oversaw the search giant’s internal IT systems. He left to be chief operating officer of new music at EMI, marrying his professional ambitions with his love of music.

One feature in particular that seems to be helping users is a link at the bottom of Gmail that provides information about the activity on their account, such as Internet Protocol addresses used to access it and when.

“I paid my admin to put appointments and contacts in my private Google Calendar,” said Merrill, who left EMI earlier this year. If he were in charge of IT security, he would have had to censure himself for violating corporate policies, but he didn’t care–he just wanted to access his appointments while waiting in the Hong Kong airport.

(Credit:
Elinor Mills/CNET News)

Engineers also have a lot of choices at Google. “We didn’t control what environments our engineers work in,” said Merrill, who is writing a book due out next year titled “Organization in the Google Era.”

“The center of innovation is consumer technologies, not enterprise,” he said. “A lot of companies are doing consumer technology that is a lot better than what we have in the enterprise.”

That might be a strange message to give to a group of security professionals, but it fit with a larger theme of the importance of innovation to companies, including innovation and practices driven by users with consumer software. That’s effectively a Google mantra.

Douglas Merrill, ex-Google CIO who recently left EMI.

“Larry Page pushed us to add that feature. We all thought it was dumb, but he’s writing our checks, so we did it,” Merrill said.

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Just look at how Acquia has boomed as it complements the Drupal community: 200 new customers in the past six months alone, including The Economist, Intuit, Sony Music, Adobe, and more.

There are two types of people, those who will spend money to save time, and those who will spend time to save money. Striking a balance is important for any open-source company getting into one of the new markets now emerging on line.

Again, great advice, but unfortunately for Walling’s thesis, there’s already a breed of company that is actively following this advice, and it’s the commercial open-source projects like JBoss, MindTouch, Openbravo, Pentaho, etc., as well as foundation-led efforts like Eclipse and Mozilla. Such organizations already know how to add the polish, documentation, and features that an organic community may lack.

With this in mind, Walling deprecates open source for failing to make software easy and intuitive for its users. While this may be true of community-led open source, it’s emphatically not true of commercial open source, which has arisen to fill the functional and procedural gaps Wallings points to as ways to beat open source.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Walling starts with a reprise of a classic Marten Mickos quote: “open-source software is free if your time is worth nothing.” It’s pithy and somewhat true, but it’s not as rich as Mickos’ commentary, which points to an opportunity in Walling’s accusation.

Save your users’ time. Ensure a painless installation process, top notch documentation, top notch support, and a minimal learning curve for getting started using your application.
Market hard. You have a marketing budget; odds are high your open source competitor does not. If you can position your product well and build a reputation for good documentation, support and usability, you will sell software.
Focus on features for your demographic. Your open-source competitor is going to win when it comes to college students, hobbyists, and other groups where time is worth a lot less than licensing cost. You will have an edge with business users since time is highly monetized for entrepreneurs and enterprises. Build features for people who are likely to buy your product.

Mickos said:

While TechDirt experiments with optimal configurations of digital media business models, Rob Walling has unwittingly landed on a sure-fire way to build billion-dollar open-source companies.

I say “unwittingly” because Walling’s post is all about “How to Compete Against Open Source Competition.” In the process, he does a fair job of describing how to build an exceptional open-source business.

In other words, provided that open-source companies can fill the revenue hole with premium features or some other value-added service that compels payment, then the other advantages of open source trump that of proprietary products.

Beyond this, and unfortunately for Walling, open-source products also have something that virtually every proprietary product will never have: free distribution and the flexibility and security that comes from source-code access.

In fact, Walling’s suggestions for proprietary competitors to open-source projects turn out to be great advice for commercial open-source projects, too:

Microsoft’s statement comes after photos of the cafe appeared on a French technology Web site.

“This initiative expresses our intention to meet with the general public and show the new Windows experiences on PC, mobile and on the Internet,” a Microsoft representative said in a statement to CNET News. “People will be able to discover Windows 7, the Windows phones and the Windows Live services.”

In the United States, Microsoft has announced plans to open a network of retail stores–with the first two opening this fall. More are slated to open next year.

Parlez-vous Windows?

For now, the Paris location is the only cafe planned, Microsoft said.

The cafe will open on Oct. 22–the day that
Windows 7 launches, Microsoft said.

Others chimed in on Wednesday with some interesting tidbits. TechCrunch observes that, ahead of the opening, the cafe is already offering free Wi-Fi to those on the sidewalk, while Silicon Alley Insider notes that the location was previously home to an eatery called Wet Willie’s.

Microsoft confirmed Wednesday that it plans to open a “Windows Cafe” in Paris where people will be able to try out the latest from Redmond while drinking a cup of coffee.

Adobe’s goal is to get Flash Player 10.1 accelerated directly on the chips in smartphones, Netbooks, and small laptops based on the ARM chip architecture, called smartbooks. To date, Flash video acceleration has not been available widely on mobile devices.

Adobe is also working, in parallel, on the back end: where servers push the content out of the cloud. Barclay explained that servers need to adjust to the type of device that’s playing back the video. “(If) the content was designed for a PC that’s got very high resolution and very big from a bandwidth standpoint…the work that we’re doing on the server side allows the content provider to detect your bandwidth and optimize the content on the fly so it doesn’t need to deliver as many pixels as a high resolution because your device simply can’t draw it.”

Conspicuous by its absence was Apple. “Flash is not available on the iPhone at this point,” said Adrian Ludwig, group manager, flash platforms at Adobe. “So far, we haven’t received the support that we need from Apple.” (Note: Adobe announced Monday that programmers will be able to create native iPhone applications using Adobe’s Flash Professional CS5 developer tool, currently in beta testing, then offer their programs as an Apple App Store download.)

RIM, Nokia, Nvidia, and Qualcomm announced their intention to bring Flash Player to devices, including BlackBerry smartphones, Nokia devices, Nvidia silicon, and Qualcomm chipsets, respectively.

Updated on October 5 at 2:00 p.m. PDT: adding information about support for iPhone

Adobe Systems has garnered the support of mobile heavy hitters such as Google, Motorola, Nvidia, Palm, RIM, and Qualcomm for its new Flash Player 10.1 software for smartphones, Netbooks, and other mobile devices. The company plans to announce the support Monday at its developer conference in Los Angeles.

Adobe also announced on Monday that Google has joined the Open Screen Project initiative. Handset manufacturers such as Motorola will ship Google Android based devices with Flash Player support “early next year,” according to a Motorola statement. Companies such as Nvidia, Broadcom, Nokia, RIM, and ARM chip suppliers such as Qualcomm, are all participants in the Open Screen Project.

For its part, Nokia said that along with Adobe it is introducing a new Nokia Web Runtime (WRT) extensions for Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 software making the creation of mobile WRT widgets for supported Nokia devices easier. Qualcomm said that the first consumer devices ready to support Flash Player 10.1 will be smartbooks and smartphones from companies such as Toshiba and will be based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset.

Nvidia will support Flash acceleration on its GeForce graphics processors, Ion chipsets, and ARM-based Tegra chips.

Intel’s Netbook technology, which is based on the Atom processor, will support the Flash Player directly on hardware by way of a Broadcom chip, according to Intel. “One would need Broadcom video acceleration to take advantage of the optimizations that Adobe is making on flash,” an Intel spokesman said.

“It’s critical to support in hardware because (Flash) video is really computationally intensive,” Tom Barclay, Adobe senior product marketing manager for Flash Player, said in an interview. “Putting that on the hardware provides the ability to play it back fluidly…so you’re not going to drain the battery on these devices.”

Apple aside, this is all part of an aggressive push by Adobe to get acceleration on mobile devices. More than 75 percent of video on the Web is delivered through the Flash Player, according to Ludwig. “Having the Flash player on your device means you’re able to access all the content out there on the Web,” Ludwig said, referring to referring to such sites as YouTube, the video inside MySpace, and Facebook, as well as Fox News and CNN.

Though Flash-based video is available on virtually all PCs, “the vast majority of mobile devices have been fundamentally closed,” according to Barclay. “This means there is a single (device maker) or carrier or handset manufacturer that can stop technology from getting onto those devices. And that’s one of the reasons why the Web as been so slow to be directly accessible from those devices.”

A public developer beta of Flash 10.1 is expected to be available for Windows Mobile, Palm WebOS, and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh, and Linux later this year, Lugwig said. Public betas for Google Android and Symbian operating systems are expected to be available in early 2010. Version 10.1 includes more comprehensive Flash player support for accelerometer-based screen orientation, in which the screen can be reoriented between landscape and portrait modes, and multitouch.

Games are also a target. Ludwig pointed to Flash-based games, such as Playfish and FarmVille, played on social-networking sites.

Toward the end of getting Flash to run directly on small mobile devices, Adobe created the Open Screen Project. “The Open Screen project is about making more of those devices open. In particular, providing flash player for free in an open manner with the requirement that (device suppliers) make it open for developers,” Barclay said.

The voice of the USB-IF is strong in this case since the group is responsible for issuing Apple the hardware vendor ID that lets its devices connect to iTunes via USB. Palm has used this process to its advantage by simulating the same ID for the Palm Pre, tricking iTunes into thinking the Pre is an Apple device.

In its initial complaint, Palm told the USB-IF that the latest update of its WebOS would restore iTunes functionality to the Pre. In response, the USB-IF quoted policy and reminded Palm that it may use only its own issued vendor IDs, not those of any other company. The group asked Palm to clarify its intentions within seven days.

Palm and Apple were not immediately available for comment.

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) said in a statement Tuesday that Apple can block the Pre from connecting to iTunes. The group issued a letter to both companies warning Palm that further attempts to use iTunes would violate the group’s policy.

Apple now has the support of a USB industry standards group in its battle to keep the
Palm Pre from using the iTunes music service.

That scheme worked until the recent release of iTunes 9, which broke the Pre’s access, prompting Palm to complain to the USB-IF that the vendor ID blocks competitors.

But the group supported Apple’s stance and cautioned Palm by letter that any further attempts to use the code would be a violation of its rules.

Even before the Palm Pre was released in June, people discovered that the device could connect to iTunes. Since then, Palm and Apple have fought a tug-of-war over iTunes access. Apple has issued various iTunes updates to block non-Apple devices, triggering Palm to find a way past them. Despite not-so-subtle warnings from Apple, Palm has remained persistent.

I tried the iPhone app. It’s a decent combo client, although I found it much better for instant messaging than for Twitter or Facebook. While it is really nice to be able to get social network items and IMs in one client, you don’t get the full visibility and control over your social accounts as you do in a full-featured client like the iPhone app Tweetdeck for Twitter, or Facebook’s own app for Facebook. But if you’re not a heavy user of the other services, the AIM Lifestream client is certainly servicable, and it’s nice to be able to update your AIM status and other sites with just one message.

A multiple-platform suite of products being announced at the TechCrunch50 event will support the service.

Liu said that the mobile clients are key to the AIM strategy and that geolocation features will be rolling out. Already, the iPhone client will report your location (if you let it) to your friends. In the future, Liu told me, you’ll be able to see what your friends have said about places near you. Another big part of the Lifestream strategy is AIM’s e-mail service. You’ll be able to use your new AOL e-mail to read and reply to all the same messages you get in your AIM clients.

The iPhone app for AIM Lifestream is available now, however, because the Apple approval process went much faster than AOL expected, said David Liu, AOL’s senior vice president of global messaging. (You’ll get AIM Lifestream when you download the paid AIM client for the iPhone.)

AIM Lifestream will end up being a powerful social client due to the sheer number of AIM users who will upgrade from the older version of AIM. And while it’s a great product for AIM power users, I don’t think it’s a good option yet for people whose online social lives revolve around other networks. In my case, for example, I’ll continue to spend time in Twitter-centric clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop, because that’s where my people are. And there’s no way AIM is going to pry my wife away from the full Facebook experience.

AOL’s instant messenger, AIM, becomes on Tuesday the AIM Lifestream and gets support for modern social services Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, and Delicious.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

In addition to instant messaging, AIM Lifestream will display updates from the social feeds mentioned above and, likewise, enable people to post back to the services. The suite of products, including mobile clients, Mac and Windows desktop apps, and a Web client, will launch on September 22. The current Lifestream Web site shows the development of the project so far. The finished version will bring instant messages into the mix.

I've got Twitter and Facebook in my iPhone AIM client.

Finally, AIM won’t be the only IM platform supported. ICQ support is coming soon. Also coming, I was told, is support for other IM networks. Liu wouldn’t say which but claimed that AOL is “having discussions” with the big platforms. That would include Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as Facebook. The Google IM system is is open. Skype support would be a neat trick; I don’t expect it.

Even so, AIM Lifestream is a good direction for AOL and I am looking forward to see how this new strategy evolves.

As a result of these shortcomings, not only were financial institutions unable to track or even to understand their overall risk position, but they lacked a single view of each trade or client in order to “triage” the crisis as it unfolded.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.

In the year since the worst financial meltdown in modern history, many financial institutions are still seeking to identify the root causes of the crisis and develop new ways to re-invent their business processes to ensure that such an event can never occur again.

In addition to human error, over-reaching risk, and simple greed, there was a key technology component that has been overlooked by most reports. According to Bob Picciano, General Manager of IBM Lotus Software and IBM Collaboration, this technological fault was made up of two elements; the lack of corporate-wide computer program integration at most banks, and a complete lack of data transparency.

It also has the fail-safe aspect of being based on a tried and tested method that not only reduces the risk inherent in any transition, but also allows easy standards-based integration with other systems the institution may decide to incorporate at a later date.

Based on a mature model already used by more than 250 banks and 150 insurance companies, the framework provides a methodology for completing gradual core banking transitions on a step by step basis, rather than all at once.

This is finally beginning to change. To help facilitate these global upgrades, as part of its Smarter Planet initiative, IBM is unveiling a new Banking Framework that will allow banks to effectively structure and integrate their applications and better manage their data.

Many banks are running applications that are older than the workers who use them–which is not necessarily wrong provided that these core systems can accommodate new ways to view and parse data.

An integrated risk management domain to support a holistic approach to managing financial risk, operational and IT risk, financial crimes detection and prevention, and compliance.
The customer care and insight domain helps banks build a foundation for creating a single view of the customer and enabling more effective and efficient sales and service.
The payments and securities domain helps banks progressively transform their payments operations to become more flexible and efficient.
The core banking transformation domain allows banks to modernize and renovate existing systems that sustain core banking functions while aligning with the changing needs of the business.

Even as events were finally catching up to the banks across the globe, they still resisted replacing their aging core banking systems, despite the fact that the cost of maintaining these systems was becoming more and more prohibitive. For example, IBM research suggests that application and infrastructure maintenance can often account for as much as 85 percent of a bank’s IT budget.

The IBM Banking Industry Framework addresses four key areas that demand the majority of a banks attention and resources, providing a path to accelerate transformation, and system upgrade with an eye towards future needs and reduced project risk. The features of the framework include:

Replacing a core banking system is akin to conducting a simultaneous heart and lung transplant on a patient that is still jogging. It’s just not realistic. And, since banks can’t afford to simply shut down their operations in order to transition to new applications, these vital upgrades were put on hold indefinitely.

This is not an uncommon scenario and it’s one that many pieces of software have tried to address via dashboard, portals, etc. But the systems need to have the right data in order to provide meaningful information.

The U.S. is the only country without a national policy to promote high-speed Internet access, noted the report. But that may be about to change.

(Credit: Communications Workers of America)

Web surfing in the U.S. averages around 5.1 megabits per second (mbps), lagging far behind top-ranked South Korea, where speeds average more than 20 mbps. In 2007, the U.S. download speed was 3.5 mbps, inching up only 1.6 mbps since then. At that rate, notes the report, it will take the U.S. 15 years to catch up with South Korea.

The average Internet download speed in the U.S. is slower than that in 27 other countries, according to a new report by the Communications Workers of America.

That’s a step in the right direction, said the CWA. But the organization would like to see more specific improvements.

In the report, the CWA called for such measures as an Internet infrastructure with enough capacity for 10 mbps downstream and 1 mbps upstream by 2010, tax incentives for businesses to provide faster speeds, and grants to provide computers and broadband equipment to low-income households.

Signed earlier this year, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes a provision for a national broadband plan by spring of next year and grants of $7.2 billion to bring high-speed Internet to rural and remote locations across the country.

The report discovered that Internet users who live in the Northeast or Mid-Atlantic regions enjoy faster speeds than those in the South or West. The five fastest states included Delaware (9.9 mbps), Rhode Island (9.8 mbps), New Jersey (8.9 mbps), Massachusetts (8.6 mbps), and New York (8.4 mbps).

The CWA’s 2009 Report on Internet Speeds also compared Internet performance throughout all 50 U.S. states.

States on the slow end were Mississippi (3.7 mbps), South Carolina (3.6 mbps), Arkansas (3.1 mbps), Idaho (2.6 mbps), and Alaska (2.3 mbps).

The 2009 report was compiled using data from the CWA’s latest Speed Matters test, which measures the time it takes to communicate with the nearest server on the Net. Gathered from May 2008 to May 2009, the test tracked the speed of more than 413,000 Internet users.

“Every American should have affordable access to high-speed Internet, no matter where they live. This is essential to economic growth and will help maintain our global competitiveness,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America. “Unfortunately, fragmented government programs and uneven private sector responses to build out Internet access have left a digital divide across the country.”