I am always tickled when I can write about (and introduce others to) open source applications that solve, quickly and easily, the very real problems that frequently arise when technology manufacturers (or providers) assume that customers use their devices in completely homogenous settings.

So today, it seems, is my lucky day -- today Funambol unleashes version 8 of its nifty open source mobile cloud push and sync software that enables a wide variety of mobile phones (including iPhones, Blackberry, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices) to share and sync information with a number of email clients, POP and IMAP mail servers, PIMs, and social networks. And while it's great to wax poetic about the subtle joy that can be had just by syncing your smartphone that wasn't designed to communicate with another software company's email and calendaring application, I'm fortunate enough to be able to share the experience with ten readers in the form of membership invites.

First, though, the important part: What's new in Funambol v8?

At OSCON last year, Jaspersoft revealed that work was underway to re-vamp JasperForge, its developer community platform. Jaspersoft's goal was to ensure that the Forge could support its community into the future by integrating new collaboration and networking tools, while enhancing the Forge's existing features.

Today, Jaspersoft has announced that the JasperForge upgrade has moved into high gear, with all of its new features and enhancements in place and operational.

This week, the Web 2.0 conference is taking place in San Francisco. In one of the early announcements in conjunction with the conference, DreamFace Interactive introduced DreamFace 2.0, the latest version of the company’s Web 2.0 application development platform based on an open source AJAX framework. You can view a demo of some of DreamFace's existing version 1.0 tools here, and there are also screenshots available. Here are more details on what will be in the new version, due this month.