Search Firm, Fast Search and Transfer, Completes AgentArts Acquisition

Needham, Massachusetts – (The Hosting News) – July 27, 2007 – Search technologies firm, Fast Search and Transfer, has acquired personalization and recommendation technology company, AgentArts, Inc., making the FAST product line, a fully integrated platform.

The new acquisition and incorporation, is hoped to ensure that FAST customers in the mobile, media, entertainment, ecommerce and knowledge discovery markets can quickly capitalize on the most innovative and effective methods to communicate with their users while strengthening competitive edge.

According to the company, AgentArts’ patented technology translates various types of user activity into meaningful content relationships which then power a wide variety of recommendation features. The technology uncovers online user habits and recommends content and promotions based on user patterns, as well as enabling social recommendations and Web 2.0 features such as enabling consumers to discover and explore valued content via insight from other people with similar interests.

Andrew Coates, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of AgentArts commented, ”People not only want search to offer up relevant information, they also want and expect their favorite online services to understand their unique needs and provide different ways to discover additional relevant content. The marriage of the world’s most powerful search engine, FAST ESP, with our recommendation and personalization technology delivers a powerful, one-stop solution for the digital industry to get the right information in front of the right person at the right time.”

Already tried and proven within the mobile sector, AgentArts has demonstrated its acumen by providing recommendations to millions of online and mobile consumers, further validating its fit with FAST ESP, the most scalable and bullet-proof enterprise search platform available on the market.

Bjorn Olstad, Chief Technology Officer for FAST remarked, ”People are social beings we want to find like-minds and discover new information and products relevant to our lives. It’s no surprise that search relevance has emerged as a key differentiating factor for online businesses. We believe that this trend will only accelerate as digital users clamor for community and social recommendation, and traditional businesses struggle to adapt. Through the acquisition of AgentArts, we continue to provide companies with innovative ways to stay ahead and provide the hyper-relevant, hyper-personalized experience people demand.”

AgentArts is a provider of recommendation and personalization solutions for music, video, games and mobile entertainment. AgentArts offers a range of recommendation, personalization, datamining and community recommendation products to help our clients deliver a more effective and targeted entertainment experience to their customers. The company was founded in January 1999, and has offices in San Francisco, California, Washington, DC, and Melbourne, Australia.

FAST is a developer of enterprise search technologies and solutions, including a flexible and scalable enterprise search platform (FAST ESP), that seeks to elevate the search capabilities of enterprise customers and connects people to the relevant information they seek regardless of medium. FAST’s solutions are used by more than 2,600 global customers and partners, including America Online (AOL), Cardinal Health, CareerBuilder.com, Chordiant, CIGNA, CNET, Dell, Factiva, Fidelity Investments, Findexa, IBM, Knight Ridder, LexisNexis, Overture, Rakuten, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, Sensis, Stellent, Tenet Healthcare, Thomas Industrial Networks, T-Online, US Army, Virgilio (Telecom Italia), Vodafone, and Wanadoo. FAST is headquartered in Norway and is publicly traded under the ticker symbol ‘FAST’ on the Oslo Stock Exchange.

For further information about FAST, please visit: www.fastsearch.com.

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