Dailymotion announced today that Cedric Tournay has been named its new CEO. Tournay replaces Ian Brotherston, who had only held the post since April. Brotherston will stay on with the company but will move over to become executive vice president of international strategy.

MediaPost reports that Dailymotion always considered Brotherston’s appointment as CEO as an interim one, though that temporary status was not mentioned at the time. We dug up the April 21, 2009, press release announcing Brotherston as CEO, which didn’t say anything about his being interim:

Dailymotion names Ian Brotherston Chief Executive Officer

Paris – April 21st 2009 – Dailymotion’s Board of Directors has announced today that Ian Brotherston has been appointed to the role of Chief Executive Officer of Dailymotion…

“We are delighted to welcome Ian as new CEO. His strong management experience will help shape Dailymotion as we continue our growth and global expansion. Ian’s primary focus will be to lead Dailymotion in its next phase of development,” says Benoist Grossmann, partner at AGF Private Equity.

Brotherston joined Dailymotion from Red Bee Media, the privatized Broadcast Technology Division of the BBC, where he was commercial cirector. A Dailymotion rep told us that the company was originally not going to announce Brotherston’s appointment since it was interim, and much of the initial press was based on leaked and incomplete information. The rep said at the time he was unable to comment on the CEO search.

Brotherston was brought on to replace then-CEO Mark Zaleski, and at the time it was rumored that Dailymotion was looking to raise additional funding this year. Zaleski had been brought on from QXL in August 2007 as executive chairman.

Tournay was most recently the CEO of Doctissimo, one of the largest health and medical web sites in Europe, and managed its sale to Lagardere group.

As far as speed bumps for cellulosic ethanol ventures go, this one’s a doozy: Jurors in a federal court have ordered Cello Energy, a biofuel startup run by Alabama’s former ethics chairman, Jack Boykin, and backed by both Silicon Valley cleantech investors Khosla Ventures and pulp maker Parsons & Whittemore Enterprises, to pay more than $10.4 million in a fraud case. According to the Alabama Press-Register, back in 2007, Cello promised P&W that it would make $16-a-barrel fuel from cellulose derived from things like hay, switchgrass and wood chips — and it has gone downhill from there. The case suggests at least two lessons for investors getting giddy about a buzzy technology: do your homework, and get ready to wait.

Cello reportedly accepted a $2.5 million investment from P&W in 2007 to help finance its first plant. Several months later it received a $12.5 million investment and a pledge for up to $25 million for construction and operation of additional plants from Khosla. Cello agreed to use discounted wood waste from the company as feedstock, but “a string of witnesses testified that samples of the fuel allegedly produced at Cello’s facility…were derived entirely from fossil and not renewable sources,” the Alabama Press-Register reports. This week a jury in Mobile, Ala., decided that Boykin’s original claims (made with his partner and son Allen Boykin) were fraudulent.

Fraud, of course, is unacceptable. But it’s also hard to sympathize with investors that threw down millions of dollars without knowing what they were really funding. Reading the blow-by-blow coverage of testimony and heated arguments in the Cello Energy trial (P&W’s lawyer at one point compared Cello to an adulterous spouse), it becomes clear that in a time when VCs were tripping over themselves for biofuel plays, P&W and Khosla Ventures weren’t exactly diligent. The excuse? P&W CEO George Landegger said he trusted Boykin after he promised to invest his own money in the $25 million project. For Khosla Ventures, whose founder Vinod Khosla has called cellulosic biofuel his “real love” and invested in more than a dozen biofuel companies, due diligence was not necessarily a deal breaker, and according to emails revealed in court between Khosla and partner Saul Kaul, Boykin refused to give the investors enough time for due diligence. That made the deal “nerve-wracking” for Kaul, but Khosla wrote, “Great job on this one. Herculean effort. But my bet is it will pay off.”

A key difference between Khosla and P&W’s outlooks on Cello and the Boykins right now seems to be the time frame in which they might have expected to see results. P&W took a stake in the venture early on, and may have expected swift commercialization (the CEO reportedly described the startup’s facility as underwhelming). Khosla, meanwhile, with his love for cellulosic biofuel, knows well that commercialization of a new cellulosic biofuel technology will take longer than that. Kaul reportedly told jurors, “We didn’t expect it to work right out of the gate…We’ll stand by patiently and supportive.” If the technology does pan out, Khosla Ventures will get about half of Cello’s revenues. If it doesn’t, well, the firm has plenty of other bets.

P&W also sued Khosla Ventures, claiming that the venture firm committed what’s called “tortious interference” — basically meddling with its business relationship with Cello and reducing its value (a bit curious, considering P&W’s claims that Cello’s process doesn’t actually work). The gist of P&W’s complaint about Khosla’s investment — made without P&W’s knowledge — is that it diluted the value of P&W’s stake, the Press-Register reports. P&W’s agreement with Cello included an option to invest another $10 million for a one-third ownership share in the company.

The jury ruled in favor of Khosla, whose investments made it the second-most active cleantech venture fund last quarter, behind only Kleiner Perkins, according to the Cleantech Group and Deloitte. As part of the original investment agreement, the firm said it would help Cello raise more funds, but after this week’s ruling, that, too, will likely be a Herculean effort.

Web workers, especially those of us who are self-employed, will sometimes encounter people who, it seems, take us less seriously because we don’t have a corporate cube to work in. There are two ways to deal with this.

Some web workers go to great lengths to mask that our office and home are one and the same. We can use P.O. box or mailbox suite addresses, and install separate phone lines that we can always answer with a business salutation. We might keep rigidly to business hours and avoid any reference in conversation that would reveal our office/home marriage.

Of course, there is another option. We can let it all hang out, so to speak, and freely acknowledge our home office location and its attendant benefits (and disadvantages) to the people we do business with.

Which of these options is best to use is somewhat a function of the industry that each of us works in and our own personal comfort level. Personally, I have chosen the second option — complete openness. There are several reasons why:

It’s cheaper. All those additional services, like a mailbox suite and additional phone line, cost money that I would much rather spend on other things like a new computer gadget.

It’s too much work to pretend. Keeping up a pretense about where my office is just takes energy I’d rather put into my actual work. And besides, I know I’d eventually make a mistake anyway and let the secret out, so why make the effort to keep it a secret at all?

It tells me what people respect. If someone dismisses me because I work from a home office, I probably didn’t want to work with them anyway. People who respect me and the quality of my work will want to work with me, no matter where my office is located. Being upfront about where I work helps sort out who respects me, and not just the office they think I have.

It makes it easier for the next web worker. Having a good experience dealing with someone that they know is working from home will hopefully lay the groundwork with people to have a better attitude towards the next web worker they encounter.

It’s my life. The bottom line is that I work from my home office because it allows me to blend my work and my personal life in a way that works for me. Pretending otherwise would defeat the purpose of that. It would remove some of the very flexibility that I have sought in being a web worker, such as the ability to be able to care after school for my autistic 6-year-old daughter while I work.

Everyone has to do what works for them, but I have chosen to be open with my web worker status. Yes, it can occasionally be awkward or get me dismissed by a few people who don’t understand the new world of web work. But I make no apologies and find that my candor serves me well in more situations than it hurts me.

How open are you with people you do business with about where your office is? Does this help or hinder you?

If you thought bankruptcy would keep the industrious folks at Psystar from making any more Mac clones, you were sorely mistaken. Like a zombie rising from the dead with an insatiable thirst for lawsuits, the little clone-maker that couldn’t is advertising a brand new model of its “Open” line of computers on its web site today.

Not only that, but it’s also claiming that its bankruptcy filing was an unfortunate, but necessary, step toward ensuring its continued viability as a company. Maybe so, but how many of you out there are eager to order a new computer of questionable build quality from a bankrupt company engaged in an ongoing legal battle with Apple, especially with notebook price drops in place, and similar desktop discounts rumored to be on the horizon?

If you’re willing to look past these minor superficial details, you can now order an Open(7) starting at $1,499. For as much as you’d spend on a real iMac, you’ll get a tower desktop PC with a 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Nehalem processor, 6GB of DDR3 RAM, a 1TB 7,200RPM SATA2 HDD, and an NVIDIA 9500GT graphics card with 512MB of onboard memory. As is standard on Psystar computers, niceties like wireless Internet and Bluetooth will cost you extra. And they’re apparently in stock right now, if you’re feeling brave.

The company’s re-emergence comes hot on the heels of news that Apple has been given the “OK” to proceed with its legal action against Psystar, which was granted last week by a Florida bankruptcy court judge. In the interim, Psystar’s Chapter 11 filing means that it has probably been able to temporarily escape its previous debts and acquired new ones through a different funding source, whose identity remains a mystery. Many hardware manufacturers would obviously benefit were OS X to be made available for any platform, so there’s probably no shortage of people interested in having a stake in Psystar’s legal case, though none would likely be very comfortable with that position being made public.

News of the new Open(7) came via Pystar’s online mailing list, in a PDF newsletter (check it out at SlashGear) sent out to subscribers detailing it, its new DUBL (Darwin Universal Boot Loader), and, in a bright red box at the bottom of the document, a rather flippant take on its recent financial and legal turmoil. Also according to the newsletter, for a limited time only, you can get free shipping on the Open(7) within the continental U.S. using a special coupon code to “Celebrate Independence.” Cheeky, Psystar. Very cheeky.

Facebook expects to “very soon” release a new version of its iPhone app, and via TechCrunch we hear it will enable video uploads from the new iPhone 3GS.

Now, this is just one social network on one (very new) phone, and yes, it’s going to be a holiday weekend in a couple hours. But the news is worth paying attention to because of the volume and nature of video-sharing that Facebook enables, and the active mobile content habits of iPhone users. In the few days after the iPhone 3GS release, YouTube, the biggest user video site out there, said its mobile video uploads were up 400 percent, with iPhone 3GS video already accounting for more than half the mobile video sent to the site.

Meanwhile, Facebook told us it sees a very significant — nearly 40 percent — chunk of its video uploads come from webcams. And at last check, Facebook received six times as many video uploads per day as MySpace, showing its personal video-sharing offering is resonating with users. The simple, accessible video sharing enabled by webcams has a lot in common with mobile phone video uploads — except with the added value of on-the-go, on-the-scene connectivity. Let’s just hope AT&T doesn’t get pissy about the upstream bandwidth.