Microsoft Elevate America is launching a program across the state of Washington that is geared towards providing free technical training in order to meet the demands of the 21st century. Gov. Chris Gregoire and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith gave a presentation about the program at the downtown Seattle WorkSource facility earlier this week.

This public-private venture will give 30,000 vouchers to WorkSource training centers right away. Up to one million vouchers will be given nationwide to train people through Microsoft e-Learning courses and prepare for Microsoft certification. The plan is to train 2 million people over the next three years at at practically no cost. Only the most advanced courses will be available at a low cost.

Microsoft partnered with the Employment Security Department in the state of Washington along with the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County for the program.

[via Wa.gov]

Lindsay Lohan is a celebrity that starred in movies such as Mean Girls, Georgia Rule, Herbie Fully Loaded, Freaky Friday, and Just My Luck. She became a party animal and got into all sorts of legal trouble such as DUI and drug possession. Lohan was most recently seen dating Samantha Ronson, an English singer and DJ that lives in L.A. However, the two recently broke up. FunnyOrDie.com decided to capitalize on this by creating a parody video of an eHarmony ad using Lohan.

In the video, Lohan is describes that she is looking for a partner that does not mind an electronic monitoring bracelet and dealing with alcoholism. Lohan also said in the video that she is looking for someone whose parents aren’t quick to file for restraining orders. “I’m a workaholic, a shopaholic and according to the state of California, an alcoholic as well as a threat to all security guards if they work at hotels,” added Lohan.

The video has been watched close to 2 million times on FunnyOrDie.com itself within the last one day.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company(PG&E), a utility company based in California is seeking approval from state regulators to enter a power purchase agreement with Solaren Corporation, a company based in Southern California to have clean power delivered in 200 megawatts form.

Solaren will generate power by using solar panels in the Earth’s orbit.  This energy will be converted into radio frequency energy for a receiving station in Fresno County to receive through transmissions.  The energy will then be converted into electricity and delivered to PG&E’s power grid.  If necessary, Solaren plans to procure additional land for an energy receiving station.

Solaren’s team comprises of satellite engineers from the U.S. Air Force and Hughes Aircraft Company.  The company is led by CEO Gary Spirnak.  If the project is successful, residents in California will be able to benefit from being able to pay for affordable clean energy.

[via Next100]

CBS is working on ways to compete against Hulu.  The CBS.com website has been thoroughly enhanced to stream high-quality episodes of their TV shows and these videos are linked to TV.com, a website that is owned by CBS as well.  Hulu removed their shows from TV.com recently.

In March, TV.com received about 679,000 unique U.S. visitors and streamed 3.4 million videos.  In February, TV.com has about 330,000 unique U.S. visitors and streamed only 1.6 million videos.  Hulu received abut 8.9 million U.S. visitors in March and streamed 349 million videos.  Hulu is run by NBC and FOX.

[via BusinessInsider]

In the fourth quarter, Motorola reported that they had a net loss of $3.6 billion.  Shortly after the announcement, CFO Paul Liska stepped down.  However Liska is claiming that he was fired for bringing up some of the issues involved with the company’s financials.

Liska decided to file a retaliatory discharged lawsuit which involves a breach of contract related to his firing.  Liska said that the financial forecasts were not accurate and ignored the facts that were known to Motorola co-CEOs Sanjay Jha and Greg Brown. Liska brought up concerns to the company’s audit team before presentations with credit agencies were made.  If the presentations were not changed, then it would lead to credit deterioration by the agencies.

Liska was eventually fired in January 29 and officially left on February 19 according to an SEC filing.  The filing reported that Liska was fired due to “serious misconduct and incompetence.”  Ouch.

[via InformationWeek]

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) is in talks with China Mobile Limited over bringing smartphones made by the computer company and powered by Google’s mobile operating system Android to the most populated country in the world.  Zhang Jun, an analyst with Wedge MKI said that the level of talks between Dell and China Mobile are very serious.  Dell wants to release two phones in China by the end of the year.

This move would be beneficial for Google, Dell, and China Mobile together.  Dell could penetrate a market that is largely untapped because the Apple iPhone is not available in China.  And Research In Motion does not have a lot of BlackBerry models selling in China either.  Google’s operating system will garner a lot of extra attention and China Mobile would have more choices of smartphones to sell.  Apple was previously in talks with China Mobile but an agreement fell through.

[via mocoNews]

Satyam Computer Services Ltd. was one of India’s top IT companies before their Chairman and founder B. Ramalinga Raju falsified the financial position.  Satyam exaggerated their cash position by as much as $1 billion by inflating the company’s quarterly earnings.  Satyam also lied about the employee count and other general information.  The controversy compared Satyam to former American energy company Enron.  Satyam became to be known as “India’s Enron.”

Since then India has been trying to figure out what to do with Satyam.  It already has a strong market share in IT, but now its reputation is tainted.  At one point it was rumored that IBM was interested in buying them out wholly, but those talks fizzled.  Now Satyam has been thrown a life line by Tech Mahindra, a telecom outsourcing company.

“We will work with Satyam’s customers, business partners, employees, and other stakeholders to restore confidence in the company and to create a platform for future growth,” stated Tech Mahindra CEO Vineet Nayyar.  Tech Mahindra has invested $422 million to buy-out 51% control of Satyam.  The deal still has to be authorized due to certain subject conditions.

Last week Raju and several of his accomplices have been charged with several crimes including conspiracy, forgery, falsification of records, evidence tampering, etc.  Others that were charged include Rama Raju, Vadlamani Srinivas, G. Ramakrishna, D. Venkapathy, Ch. Srisailam, Suryanarayana Raju.  Two others that were charged are employees of Pricewaterhouse Coopers India.

Since the controversy began, the United Nations and SanDisk decided to pull out of conducting any sort of business with Satyam.  In order to invest in Satyam, Tech Mahindra had to raised $55 million through short-term debt.  The Satyam may be given a new name and CEO as a result.

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), a server infrastructure company has revealed a new product to the market.  The new product is called the Symmetrix Virtual Matrix (V-Max) and it replaces the former predecessor the DMX-4.  V-Max is powered by Intel quad-core processors and can support around 8 engines and 128 ports.

The V-Max is built on solid-state Flash disk drives, SATA disks, and Fibre Channel.  One EMC V-Max can hold about 2,400 disks and hold 2Pbytes of storage.  Down the line, EMC plans to set-up a way for customers to string a bunch of V-Maxes together to make a highly scalable storage environment.

“Server virtualization has caught fire, and there is no turning back. To realize the ultimate benefit, however, the whole infrastructure stack has to be virtualized and integrated. EMC’s new Virtual Matrix Architecture provides all the missing ingredients required for the virtual data center at the high-end storage layer—infinite effective scale in all dimensions, a single system image to manage and dynamic self-optimization,” stated Steve Duplessie, Senior Analyst of The Enterprise Strategy Group at EMC.

[via EMC PR]