OStatic

Over the past few years, the set-top box industry has been nothing short of a disaster. In addition to Digeo, makers of the Moxi DMR, cutting its workforce in half and ditching most of its products, TiVo - the world's most popular DVR company - lost almost $48 million last year, easily eclipsing the company's $34 million loss in 2006.

Dell begins bundling FonalityοΎ’s open-source software with its enterprise servers today, its latest gambit to compete in the already-crowded VoIP market οΎ— this time targeting companies with 125 employees or fewer.

Om reported yesterday that Automattic, which makes the blogging platform WordPress (which we use), just raised $29.5 million in a B-round of venture funding. It is a big deal for the blogging industry ? one investor is The New York Times, just the latest warning flare over the bow of old media. (True Ventures, an Automattic investor, has also funded GigaOM.)

Chris Lyman, the founder of the VoIP startup, Fonality, blogs under the moniker Janitor? which he prefers to his other title: CEO.

Under a new partnership unveiled today, Kaltura, maker of embeddable collaborative video webware, will bring video to the Wikimedia family of sites. The beta program, which is being dubbed an open, collaborative video experiment, will allow users to add and remix rich media via an embeddable player on wiki pages.

In a move designed to make MySQL enterprise friendly, give prospective IT hardware buyers more reasons to consider Sun and further fuel Microsoft's Open Source heartburn, Sun announced today it is acquiring MySQL AB for $1 billion in cash and debt.

There are many benefits to using open source software for web applications: rapid development cycles, leading functionality in many market segments, and of course the price. But actually deploying those applications can be a huge, daunting nuisance. The WordPress installation instructions, for example, may brag of taking only five minutes - but that presumes you are already running MySQL and PHP and a web server and are comfortable configuring them.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications are emerging as some of the best available applications for on-demand use. There are few applications that you can access within a browser that are more immediately useful. While many web workers use fee-based applications such as Salesforce.com, there is a growing crop of free alternatives. In this post, I'll round up two of these that are worth looking into.