| US futures up on BHP bid, Alcoa higher
S&P 500 and Dow stock futures rose as shares of natural resources companies, including Alcoa Inc, gained after BHP Billiton disclosed it had made a bid for rival miner Rio Tinto. The BHP bid news, coming a day after Wall St suffered its worst slide in three months, helped mitigate investors' unease about credit losses at financial services companies. Comments from Cisco Systems Inc that the credit crisis was hurting the technology sector also added to worry. "We had a minor capitulation yesterday, which should lead to an early bounce in the first couple hours of trading today," Matt McCall, president of Penn Financial Group in Denver, Colorado, said. He said BHP's willingness to pay a premium for Rio and a rise in BHP's stock were bullish signals that demand for commodities was strong.
Betfair scores 100 per cent uptime Down Under
When UK-based online trading site Betfair was granted a licence to operate in Australia this January, it built a new data centre and flew the entire set-up from the UK to Tasmania on two chartered aeroplanes. In the first three weeks of going live, the company has achieved 100 per cent uptime. Betfair is an online trading exchange and according to the company's director of infrastructure Paul Moss, the challenges of keeping such a system available are similar to - and sometimes more demanding than - a stock exchange. Moss said: "The site always has to be available. Unlike the stock exchange, which shuts down at 17:00 for storage upgrades and firmware upgrades, Betfair can't stop. It is just like a stock exchange but 24/7. .
Acacia Research agrees to license technology to French software maker ...
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. - Acacia Research Corp. said Wednesday that its Disc Link Corp. subsidiary has agreed to license patented technology to French software maker Dassault Systemes SA. The agreement covers patents relating to portable storage devices with links. The technology generally relates to products sold or distributed on CDs or DVDs that include a link to retrieve additional data from the Internet. Acacia Research's subsidiaries control 90 patent portfolios. The company's shares dropped 30 cents, or 3.8 percent, to $7.54 in afternoon trading. The stock has plunged from a 52-week high of $17.92 in mid-November to a low of $7.63 on Jan. 9. .
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