Palm Ventures has announced a new strategic investment of US$50 million in HealtheTech -- a personal health technology company that offers a suite of Palm OS products.

Handspring has announced that they will be offering International English configured Visor handhelds in: Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Handspring's primary distributor in these countries will be MDS Holdings' IMC Middle East.

Socket Communications has announced that they expect to be shipping to interested parties their Bluetooth Evaluation Kit for Embedded Systems in Q1'2001. Current "beta" testers of the kit include Intermec Technologies which plans to use the technology in future data collection scanners and printers.

Vindigo will be adding Cahners In-Stat Group (a high-tech market research firm) has concluded a new "eBusiness Computing Infrastructure" report on wireless Internet and mobile devices. They expect an overall sales growth for the "palmtop market" through 2004 to be in the 28% range. The actual report is called "Mobile Computing Devices: A New Era in Personal Computing (#CM0005MC)" and it can be purchased via: www.instat.com/catalog/cm0005mc.

Ectaco has announced a new website that hosts their multilingual dictionary universal Translator ML101. The dictionary supports 10 languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Turkish and Czech. They also offer mobile Windows, Palm OS, and Pocket PC solutions.

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)