Teambox is a project management and collaboration web application. It lets the user take care of task planning as well as the sharing of information among team members, the confection of mailing lists, and related issues.

Note that this application is free to begin with, and there is no limit to the number of projects that you can create at the same time, nor the number of people that can take part of them concomitantly. Notes can be created for everybody to edit and stay updated on the way the project is shaping up, and learn about new priorities as they come along.

 With Sun Microsystems’ US$1 billion acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL announced Wednesday, Sun gets ownership of a major player in the open-source software industry while MySQL gets the backing of a multibillion-dollar, established systems company.Called the largest open-source software deal ever, the merger makes Sun the owner of a critical part of the popular LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python/PHP) open-source software stack. Sun already has been offering up its own software to open source, even basing its development tools strategy on the open source NetBeans platform.”MySQL is an important part of the LAMP stack, [and] has grown to be enterprise-ready technology used by large organizations, and Sun is now a major player in the LAMP stack,” said Raven Zachary, analyst with The 451 Group. MySQL customers get the benefit of a larger support organization,Zachary said. Sun, meanwhile, will push MySQL as enterprise-ready technology and as an alternative to proprietary databases like Oracle, he said. “I think Sun has really been struggling in building a software revenue stream around its open-source projects, and I think for them to take on MySQL, now they have a very successful revenue stream around an open-source software [stack] that was lacking before,” said Zachary.

Spicebird is a new open source organizer mash-up from Synovel that uses Mozilla technologies to combine the e-mail and contact tools of Thunderbird with the calendar and scheduling features in Sunbird to create a slick new integrated communications application.

Spicebird is still in its infancy, currently 0.4 beta, but already the first public release offers an impressive set of features, including e-mail, calendaring, instant messaging and other communication tools.

Synovel first demoed Spicebird a few weeks ago and there’s a video of Spicebird in action on the site which showcases some of the applications finer points, like automatic event detection in e-mails and ability to add those events to your calendar with a single click.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the basic interface for Spicebird is a series of tabs holding each primary element of the app — e-mail and news, contacts, calendar and tasks. The homepage of Spicebird looks a bit like an iGoogle or NetVibes page with little preview widgets for selected e-mail folders, RSS feeds, calendar events and more. All the widgets can be customized to suit your work habits.

Despite subdividing the interface into tabs, working Spicebird remains a seamless process. For instance, if you get an e-mail where Spicebird detects an appointment or meeting, it will offer a link to add that event to your calendar. Clicking the link will automatically switch over to your calendar tab and add the event to your schedule.

Spicebird also offers an integrated Jabber chat client, which means you can connect to GTalk and other Jabber-based services out of the box. The interface itself is pretty barebones at the moment, but it gets the job done.

So far Spicebird probably sounds more or less like Outlook, Evolution or even Gmail since all these info organizers offer similar features and indeed that’s more or less what this first release is — a proof of concept.

But Spicebird has big plans and the next revision (0.7 according to the roadmap) promises some even more interesting features like an integrated blog publishing tool, stored IM transcripts and support for more protocols, as well as a new tabbed e-mail interface (also in the works for Thunderbird 3.0).

The final version of Spicebird hopes to deliver CMS integration (via Drupal), a document manager, Microsoft Exchange support and eventually some variation on the the “inbox as an organizer for social networks” idea that seems to very popular of late.

In the mean time, if you’re interested in checking out Spicebird, you can download a version for Windows or Linux from the website (Mac users, it doesn’t look like Spicebird currently has any plans for Mac OS X).

I tested Spicebird on Windows XP and found it to be quite stable and very usable, even in its current beta form. Although it doesn’t yet have some of what could be its killer features, like the Songbird music player, Spicebird is definitely one to watch.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/01/spicebird-offer.html