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Mobile Internet service Avantgo has offered subscribers a channel devoted exclusively to that most important of annual spring rituals, the NCAA Men's Division I tournament, for four years running. As in the past, its 2006 College Basketball Web site provides game-day information directly to users' smartphones and PDAs wirelessly or through desktop synchronization.

With the channel, subscribers get a 24-hour news feed via ESPN's SportsTicker and additional headline news and editorials from The Sporting News, including updated brackets - updated within an hour of the end of a game - the latest scores, schedules, player stats and game recaps.

Invite additional AvantGo subscribers and others to join a pool and predict the bracket winners for each game with a new bracket pool feature. These private pools are self-administered to allow for personalized scoring preferences and a running total of individual scores in the pool. You may even choose to go nationwide with your bracket predicting skills, pitting yourself against other channel subscribers around the country.

Avantgo senior director Neil Versen says, "We're excited to be able to offer college basketball tournament fans a free application that can not only keep them informed but can also help them easily manage their brackets and office pools."

Automaker Nissan sponsored last year's college hoops offering, while in 2006 the honor goes to Esurance, an online car insurance broker. According to Esurance managing director and CMO John Swigart, the Avantgo channel is great way for the company to reach its target customer, tech-savvy busy professionals.

"The rich, interactive medium that AvantGo provides is a novel way to extend our brand to a mobile audience with entertaining and useful information," Swigart says.

Avantgo, a division of Sybase subsidiary iAnywhere, is available for mobile devices built on the Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and RIM BlackBerry platforms. It added support for RSS feeds last year.