AvantGo has announced "US$31 million of mezzanine financing from investors Goldman Sachs, American Express, Ford Motor Company, McKessonHBOC, and Research In Motion (RIM)." This is in addition to their existing investors: "21st Century Internet Venture Partners, H&Q Venture Associates, Adobe Ventures and Fayez Sarofim & Co."

The PMN News Service is reporting that Symbian has finished formation of their Japanese research facility that will work on: "information management, multimedia technology, user interfaces and optimizing the EPOC OS for better performance."

Thinque Systems has announced that their "Sales Portfolio" -- a mobile customer relationship management (eCRM) and field force automation (FFA) solution -- will support Microsoft's Windows Pocket PCs.

Fujitsu PC Corporation (FPC) has announced that Winncom Technologies has been awarded "MasterVAR status" and can resell a wide variety of FPC's pen tablet and notebook computing solutions to worldwide customers.

Aportis Technologies has released BrainForest Professional 1.0 (US$40) for Windows, Macintosh, and Palm Computing platform devices. BrainForest is a "comprehensive hierarchical outlining tool that is ideal for action item organizing, idea tracker, project planner, and checklist manager."

PC World is reporting that "IBM BOOSTS POCKETPC STORAGE - Tiny hard drive can add 340MB of storage to PocketPC devices."

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com) eFax: 978-246-3067