In brief: Microsoft to buy search company
Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday it agreed to buy a Norwegian search company for $1.2 billion, aiming to shore up its search technology for businesses against competition from Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp.
Microsoft’s cash offer of $2.97 a share for Fast Search & Transfer ASA represented a 42 percent premium over the stock’s Jan. 4 closing price.
Fast, a 10-year-old company based in Oslo, is one of the biggest enterprise search players. Its technology, like those of competitors Autonomy Corp. and Endeca Technologies Inc., helps workers inside a business locate data kept in a tangle of different types of files and databases.
It could, for example, find benefits information posted on a company intranet, an annual report from five years ago buried in a folder on a file server, the name of a colleague with a certain expertise or figures from software that tracks customer relationships.
Denver
Frontier predicting even greater loss
Frontier Airlines Holdings Inc. on Tuesday warned it would post a wider-than-expected loss in the third quarter because of storm-related expenses in December and fewer passengers on some routes to sunny destinations.
It was the second time in the past month that Frontier, which operates flights between Spokane and Denver, has revised its forecast for the October-December quarter. It predicted a pretax loss ranging between 78 cents and 88 cents a share excluding special items. That compared with Dec. 5 guidance of a pretax loss of 58 cents to 68 cents a share excluding special items.
The forecast came as rival Southwest Airlines Co. scheduled a news conference today where it is expected to announce an expanded flight schedule in Denver.
Las Vegas
Yucca Mountain workers laid off
The Energy Department is cutting operations and the chief contractor is laying off its staff at the desert site where the government plans to build a national nuclear waste repository, officials said Tuesday.
“The tunnel is closed,” Yucca Mountain project and Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson said, attributing the moves to cuts in congressional funding for the repository, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Entry to the site’s underground tunnel will be restricted to a small staff of technicians and maintenance workers, Benson said.
Officials with Bechtel SAIC Co., the main project contractor, said 63 contractors had lost their jobs, leaving about 15 “caretaking” employees while project planners complete a shift from exploring and site evaluation to preparing an application for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to operate the repository.