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Swallowing ATI Technologies seems to be causing some financial heartburn for AMD, and the company now needs the financial equivalent of Alka Seltzer: a big write-down of intangible assets related to ATI.

In a brief 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, AMD said the current carrying value of its goodwill (translation: the value of ATI’s assets) “was impaired” (translation: it’s worth a lot less than planned).

AMD reached this conclusion based on an updated financial analysis for the year ahead, when it does its annual goodwill examinations. It also comes one day ahead of an analyst conference in New York, where the company will likely face questions about the write-down.

In the filing, AMD reported it expects that the impairment charge (translation: write-off) will come in the current quarter and “will be material, but the Company has determined that, as of the time of this filing, it is unable in good faith to make a determination of an estimate of the amount or range of amounts of the impairment charge.” An amended filing with estimates or ranges of estimates will be filed within four days.

AMD spokesman Drew Prairie said ATI had a bad Q4 in 2006 and has been slowly recovering from it. During the quarter, the unit’s HD2000 video card line were delayed coming to market. ATI also faced problems stemming from a troubled “mobility customer,” though he did not elaborate. Since then, the division has been recovering.

“It shouldn’t be read as a statement that businesses are performing worse in this quarter or Q3 or Q2 than they were a year ago,” he told InternetNews.com. “It’s not like an analysis was done and said they’ve been sliding for the year.”

Adobe Systems today announced it will release the remoting and messaging technologies used in Flex, Flash and other Adobe products as open source projects. Because the technologies are fairly mature, Adobe isn’t so much looking for help from the open source community as it is looking to get its technology into more hands.

Adobe intends to release the remoting and HTTP-based messaging technologies in its LiveCycle Data Services ES along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification under the named BlazeDS. They will be made available as public betas under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v3 and downloadable from Adobe Labs.

The Action Message Format (AMF3) is a binary data protocol specification used in a variety of Adobe products, including Flash, which is used on almost every computer due to its availability on Linux and Mac OS in addition to Windows.

Adobe said BlazeDS will allow developers to add data connectivity to rich Internet applications (RIAs) (define), such as its Flex and AIR client technologies, for real-time collaboration and data-push capabilities. It will also allow RIAs to easily connect back to server applications ranging from Java apps to Adobe ColdFusion components.

“We want to provide much broader access to this important data integration technology for Flex and AIR developers,” Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager at Adobe told InternetNews.com. “As people build more and more rich Intenet apps, they have more requirements for connectivity to back end systems for exchanging data between clients and servers.”

Facebook on Wednesday announced it will allow developers to transfer their applications built on the Facebook Platform to other social networks.

In a move destined to be seen as a counter to Google’s OpenSocial, Facebook will also license the tools and tags underlying the platform architecture to other platforms.

In effect, this will enable developers to cross-pollinate their applications developed on the Facebook Platform on any sites that have adopted the Facebook standards with no additional effort.

Without question, the trend of opening APIs is gathering steam across social networks.

Facebook’s announcement comes on the same day that Bebo, the popular British social networking site, announced the launch of its Open Application Platform, which will be compatible with both the Facebook Platform and OpenSocial.

Bebo is the first social network to implement the Facebook Platform standards; it will adopt OpenSocial in 2008.

Bebo had earlier announced that it would invite developers into its platform, but made the launch official with its gala event this morning in San Francisco. Inaugural development partners include NBC Universal, Yahoo and CBS, as well as perennial “widgeteers” Bantr, Jangl and Flixster.

On Monday, LinkedIn announced that it would turn over a set of APIs and widgets to select partners and that those partners would, in turn, be able to build applications on LinkedIn’s site using OpenSocial.

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