School of Management, Schibsted and Accenture. International partners are Cornell University, University College Dublin and Dublin City University. PHAROS The European Commission (EC) funded the research project “The Platform for Search of Audiovisual Resources Across Online Spaces” (PHAROS). The mission of PHAROS was to transform audiovisual search from a point-solution search engine model to an integrated search platform paradigm, incorporating future user and search requirements as key design principles. History 1997–1999: Development FAST was founded in 1997, and the initiation of the company stems from the Department of Computer and Information Science at NTNU. Professor Arne Halaas at NTNU was a substantial contributor in the early days of FAST. John M. Lervik, a student from NTNU, was one of the first employees at FAST. He took his doctorate under the supervision of Professor Tor A. Ramstad and eventually became the company's CEO, until January 2009. During 1998 and 1999, FAST announced strategic alliances with Lycos, Dell and TIBCO, and the first commercial launch of products took place in 1999. 2000–2003: Commercialization During 2000, FAST announced several new European and US customers and partners. The company's IPO took place in June 2001, and FAST is publicly traded on the main board of the Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE) under the ticker symbol 'FAST'. The company continued over the next couple of years to announce new contracts with customers and partners such as eBay, IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Telus, Elsevier, and Broadvision. FAST was ranked number three on the 2002 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology companies in Europe. In 2003, FAST decided to focus on enterprise search, and sells their Internet division, including FAST Web Search, FAST PartnerSite and AlltheWeb.com, to Overture Services, Inc. (later acquired by Yahoo!). 2004–2007: Expansion In January 2004, FAST introduced the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP.) to the market. During the following three years, FAST expanded its geographical reach by opening new offices in Asia, Middle East, Latin America and Africa, extended its partnership relations through the introduction of the FAST X10 partner program, and introduced new solutions aimed specifically at certain business areas, like FAST ImPulse for eCommerce and FAST AdVisor for Internet yellow pages and portals. The company was for the first time placed in the Leader's Quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology in 2004, and stayed in the Leader's Quadrant over the next years as