Want to take a spin in a sleek, battery-powered car (with a $101,500 price tag)? You’re in luck. Tesla Motors is opening its much-anticipated store in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood this weekend, offering public rides on Saturday and Sunday (and a VIP customer reception Friday night). It’s the fourth U.S. store for the Silicon Valley company — which hopes its roadsters will appeal to Seattle’s high-tech, eco-friendly populace.

"Seattle remains an important regional base for Tesla because of the disproportionate number of technophilic early adopters and environmentally conscious consumers. It has long mirrored the demographic trends of Silicon Valley," Tesla spokeswoman Rachel Konrad said in an email. Konrad said the Seattle area is already home 30 Tesla customers (a group that reportedly includes billionaire Paul Allen).

Tesla announced its Seattle plans in May. Its showroom, in a brick warehouse at 435 Westlake Ave., will certainly have some proximity to Seattle’s tech community, with Amazon.com’s new headquarters campus nearby (first Amazonians are due to move in next year).

Tesla has been through some rocky times but got a boost this year with a $50 million investment from Germany’s Daimler (maker of Mercedes) and a $465 million Department of Energy loan to finance production of the all-electric Model S sedan. Tesla also has stores in Silicon Valley, West L.A. and New York City and plans to open more in Chicago and Miami later this summer.

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and Microsoft confirms Windows 7 Family Pack for up to three PCs  

Pricing and other details are still scarce, but Microsoft this afternoon confirmed that it will offer a "Family Pack" version of the upcoming Windows 7 operating system, with a license that will let people install it on as many as three machines.

"I know there have been some rumors going around about a ‘family pack’ for Windows 7," writes Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc. "We have heard a lot of feedback from beta testers and enthusiasts over the last 3 years that we need a better solution for homes with multiple PCs. I’m happy to confirm that we will indeed be offering a family pack of Windows 7 Home Premium (in select markets) which will allow installation on up to 3 PCs. As I’ve said before, stay tuned to our blog for more information on this and any other potential offers."

Presumably those details will come sometime before the Oct. 22 launch of the operating system. Previous online clues have suggested that a Windows 7 Family Pack upgrade will be available for around $150. That compares to a $119.99 price for a standalone upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium.

Apple has said it will offer the family pack of its upcoming Snow Leopard Mac OS X for $49, as an upgrade from the existing Leopard operating system, for installation on up to five computers.

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and Daptiv’s Pancottine resigns as company seeks new CEO  

After more than three years on the job, Jeff Pancottine resigned as chief executive of Seattle-based Daptiv today due to "personal reasons," the company said.

A replacement has not been named at the Seattle maker of online project management software, though Kevin Hickey has been appointed as chairman of the board. Hickey — who was in attendance at a company meeting today along with other board members — is leading the search for a new CEO.

Vice President of Marketing Tim Low said he didn’t have any more news on Pancottine’s departure.

"He made a great contribution to the Daptiv team while he was here, and we’re sad about not seeing him every day going forward," Low said.

Investors remain bullish on Daptiv’s progress, including Bay Partners and Kennet which made an additional investment in the company last quarter, Low said. He added that the board is looking for a new "growth-oriented" CEO to lead the company through the next stage.

Hickey is a veteran of IBM and NetPro, which was sold last year to Quest Software for $78 million. He’s worked with a number of Kennet’s portfolio companies in the past.

Daptiv, a 12-year-old company which helps organizations collaborate on projects, tomorrow plans to release more information on the company’s progress during the second quarter.

Among the results is that the company added more than 30 new customers, including the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Fuzebox, Hawaiian Airlines and Stony Brook University Medical Center.

Daptiv also turned a profit in the second quarter, which Low said was "a great milestone for us." The company cut 24 staffers earlier this year, leaving it with a workforce of 100 people at the time.

John Cook is co-founder of TechFlash. Follow on Twitter @johnhcook.

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UW project makes online personal data ‘vanish’  

Interviewing for a job, but wondering if your prospective employer will turn up embarrassing college photos of you on Facebook? A team of University of Washington computer scientists think they’ve come up with the answer. The team has developed a prototype service that makes electronic communications "automatically self-destruct" after a set period of time. The service, "Vanish," was released today as a free, open-source tool that works with the Firefox browser.

Here’s UW describes the technology:

The Vanish prototype washes away data using the natural turnover, called "churn," on large file-sharing systems known as peer-to-peer networks. For each message that it sends, Vanish creates a secret key, which it never reveals to the user, and then encrypts the message with that key. It then divides the key into dozens of pieces and sprinkles those pieces on random computers that belong to worldwide file-sharing networks, the same ones often used to share music or movie files. The file-sharing system constantly changes as computers join or leave the network, meaning that over time parts of the key become permanently inaccessible. Once enough key parts are lost, the original message can no longer be deciphered.

The UW says Vanish provides a better option that simple deletion (given that many web services archive data indefinitely) and encryption (which can be overturned by legal action). The tool can be applied to things like e-mail, Facebook posts and chat messages, making them "irretrievable from all Web sites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers."

"In today’s world, private information is scattered all over the Internet, and we can’t control the lifetime of that data," said UW computer science professor Hank Levy in a statement, adding that "as we transition to a future based on cloud computing, where enormous, anonymous datacenters run the vast majority of our applications and store nearly all of our data, we will lose even more control."

Along with Levy, the team behind Vanish includes UW doctoral student Roxana Geambasu, assistant professor Tadayoshi Kohno, and undergraduate student Amit Levy, all from the UW computer science department. Here’s their paper on their project, as well as a how-to video below:

 

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