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Get NewsWireless Net on your handheld? AvantGone that way yet ...

There has been no point in offering a palm-friendly version of the NewsWireless Net yet, because it costs too much to produce; and the alternative of going via AvantGo has been even more costly - but that may change, with the purchase of AvantGo planned by Sybase subsidiary, iAnywhere.

If ever there was a killer mobile app, AvantGo was it; it gave readers of most daily newspapers an alternative way of reading from their palm-top computers - and it was free.

The trouble is, free editorial has to be paid for, and AvantGo planned (in the heady days of big-bucks advertising on the Web) to collect via adverts.

It never happened. Very, very few publications ever got their acts together enough to produce special versions of advertising for their hand-held editions - they were just too small. And when the dot-coms collapsed, and the economic slowdown began, advertising revenue was the first to get hit. AvantGo became vulnerable - and has now been snapped up for a pitiful $38m by iAnywhere, which is a Sybase subsidiary.

The announcement describes the takeover as a "cash merger" but the sad truth is that AvantGo is just another casualty of the recession.

"The acquisition of AvantGo positions iAnywhere Solutions as the leading player in the mobile middleware market," is the Sybase take.

Those of us who have never heard of the "mobile middleware market" and who suspect it of being a meaningless buzzword will not be much reassured by reading that this will be achieved: "by combining both companies' market presence and award-winning technologies."

Who is iAnywhere, ianyhow? "iAnywhere Solutions, Inc is the market-leading provider of mobile, embedded and workgroup databases and mobile middleware solutions that enable anywhere, anytime access to enterprise information," says the web site.

On paper, iAnywhere is successful: "There are more than seven million seats of iAnywhere Solutions technology at work in over 10,000 customer sites worldwide," claims the company. It has database and sync technology which has been described as "market leading" by reports, but the sad truth is that corporate adoption of intranet-push to hand-helds has been disappointing, simply because the wireless infrastructure to make this useful doesn't exist.

One of the most promising deals last year, was a strategic alliance between Information Builders and Research In Motion, to take corporate data out to mobile executives. IBI has truly impressive Web-based publishing software, but the product depends on universal access by a corporation's executives to the Blackberry hand-held two-way pager, and sales of that have been disappointing outside the US.

The good news is that Sybase does have money. It's not wealthy in the sense that large high-tech companies were wealthy five years ago, but it is expecting to be able to invest in wireless news distribution.

It will need to do so. The dream of seeing this technology heavily subsidised by advertising is just a cold memory as the industry shivers through the cold night of recession. And the alternative of seeing subscription-based news distribution remains a long-term option, but only for those who can afford to keep going with traditional (advertising-sponsored) media publishing methods in the interim.

Subscription based wireless media will probably never rival advertising media; it's just the current advertising turn-down which makes subscriptions look more promising. Relatively, they may be (it hasn't been proved yet) but there's no sign of this happening in the next year or so.

For iAnywhere Solutions, the wireless, and offline capabilities provided by AvantGo are an essential part of its aims to be ubiquitous. To be able to get AvantGo for so small an investment is a stroke of luck for Sybase, indeed.