Before Broadcom made the ticker AVGO famous, it belonged to a small San Mateo company that put the web in your pocket. AvantGo's software copied news, stock quotes and other web pages onto Palm and Pocket PC handhelds whenever you synced them. You could read the internet on the train, with no connection at all. In the fall of 2000, AvantGo went public as the hope for a mobile internet was colliding with a falling Nasdaq.

Once Called Bombardier

The company was incorporated in June 1997 as Bombardier Software and became AvantGo in January 1998. It released its first software that May. AvantGo ran two businesses. Its free consumer service let publishers send channels of content to handhelds. Its enterprise software let companies push their own data to mobile workers in the field. The bet was that handhelds, and soon wireless phones, would become a main way people reached the web.

From AVGO to Sybase

AvantGo priced at $12 a share in late September 2000 and listed on Nasdaq under AVGO. The dot-com crash soon cut its stock to a fraction of that. Smartphones with real browsers were still years away, and handhelds stayed a niche. In early 2003 Sybase bought AvantGo for about $1.03 a share in cash and folded it into its mobile software unit.

Cover: The Dover Express, Charles B. Newhouse. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a mail coach on the road (news that travels).