OStatic

Earlier, Lisa talked about Funambol's addition of non-intrusive advertisements to their myFUNAMBOL portal, at least for a few phone models.Being the somewhat reluctant owner of a new Blackberry, and a Linux user, I had heard of Funambol. I knew it was open source software, and I knew that Funambol was one of a few applications that had reasonable success syncing BlackberryOS, and a few other platforms, with Linux.

MyFUNAMBOL portal has a few hiccups to iron out (it is still in beta), but it seems to be truly useful. The operating system used on the desktop could become a non-issue for most.

BMW announced this week at the Convergence 2008 automotive electronics conference that it is in search of an open source partner in developing a car computing platform.

Some speculate that an agreement between BMW and Mercedes-Benz that determines some hardware purchasing decisions is a major influence in BMW's preference for an open source system. Another factor BMW credits is how fast technology changes, and how open platforms are able to keep pace.

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the Moblin Project, designed to bring open source applications to mobile devices. Though the news generally focuses on big name distributions getting involved, Moblin still features the community feel and involvement that draws many to open source projects.

One tool that Moblin offers the community to (hopefully) encourage participation is the Moblin Image Creator. The MIC allows developers to easily define projects, build them for mobile platforms, add applications and function sets to the target system images, and easily create images for live distributions (with the option of enabling rewrites/persistence), installation, or testing in virtual terminals.

Mozilla Labs recently offered a sneak peak and download of Geode. Geode is one of the first applications to use the new W3C geolocation specification API. It is currently available as a plug-in for Firefox 3 (and seems to only support Windows and Mac systems at this time). Mozilla Labs indicates it will likely be a new feature integrated in an upcoming browser release.

Geode uses web-based tracking, which tends to be faster than the traditional GPS geolocation methods. This would enable Firefox to sense the user's location and give information, for example, on local businesses, or quick access to local news.