Northern Lights Ventures, a Tacoma private equity firm founded by former Russell Investments executives Andy Turner and Paul Greenwood, is linking up with one of  Europe's largest banks, PNB Paribas of France. PNB Paribas is taking a small minority stake in Northern Lights, and investing in the firm's private equity fund. Northern Lights was formed in late 2006 and invests in new and emerging money management firms. The Financial Times reports Northern Lights plans to acquire a U.K. boutique firm with $700 million under management later this month.

Redmond's Concur is investing in RideCharge, an Alexandria, Va.-based travel booking service that lets business travelers electronically book, pay and get reimbursed for metropolitan taxi, sedan and shuttle transport.

Having trouble moving your data to the cloud? Amazon Web Services is toying with the notion of having people send in their computer hard drives so the data can be loaded into Amazon's S3 storage service.

San Francisco online real estate startup Trulia is reviewed by Katherine Boehret of The Mossberg Solution, who notes that the company will begin offering a new tool called CompareIt that allows home buyers to compare five properties side by side.

Mobile search startup Medio said it will work with T-Mobile on its web2go service, with its search offering to be used by the mobile phone company's customers to more easily locate games, ringtones and other digital media content.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have donated $12.5 million to Mobile Money for the Unbanked, an effort that helps people in developing countries conduct banking on mobile devices. The grant money will support 20 projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with a goal of bringing mobile banking technologies to 20 million people by 2012.

Two former Microsoft employees who moved their startup from Seattle to San Francisco last year are publicly unveiling DocVerse for Microsoft Office, an easy way to share documents with others. More on the startup --- led by Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui -- from TechCrunch.

TechCrunch has now tabulated more than 300,000 layoffs in the tech sector since it started count last August, noting that the pace has accelerated in recent weeks as Cisco, Pioneer, NEC, Electronic Arts have cut back.

Oregon's struggling economy is the subject of this opinion piece in Forbes, with writer Joel Kotkin noting that: "Over the past year, Oregon's economy has fallen off a cliff just about as fast as any state in the union."