3rd annual Russian Internet and Business Conference
The third annual “Internet and Business” conference has been announced in Russia this week. CIB-2008 is the largest internet conference in Russia and last year attracted over 2000 visitors. All the leading lights of Runet will be in appearance, including Yandex, Begun, Mail.ru, Rambler and Google. The conference itself is free of charge and will […]
New IPO Rumours for Russian Yandex
The Moscow Times reports that the leading Russian search engine, Yandex, plans for float shares in an IPO on New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange this fall. They have accredited this to a “banking source with knowledge of the matter”. Yandex is currently the most popular search engine in Russia with approximately 55% market coverage. In […]
Russians invest $30 million in social networking site Badoo
Techcrunch reports that social networking site Badoo has received $30m from Russian investor Finam for a 10% stake in the company. The funds are to build the service in Russia, where the social networking market has reached around 10m users in January. Badoo’s social networking site with photo and video sharing has 12.7 million registered […]
You just clicked on the Russian internet – and it's private
The Guardian reports on the Russian government pushing for control of the internet inside Russian using Cyrillic characters not just to sit on top of the web pages – but controlling things at a domain level. The issue here is that the Russian suffix .ru tranliterates into Cyrillic as .py or Paraguay’s domain name. Icann […]
Yandex releases autumn report on Russian blogosphere
Russian search leader Yandex, has released their Autumn report on the current state of the blogosphere in Russia. As you might expect, the report is in Russian so I’ll give you some of the highlights here. – There are now 3.1m blogs in Runet, 2.6 times larger than this time last year. – The blogosphere […]
MySpace sets sights on Russia
MySpace, the popular social networking site has announced plans to roll out a Russian language version to capitalise on the country’s fast-growing Internet advertising business. Alexa currently ranks MySpace in 55th place in Russia but analysts say their competitive advantage lies in coming to a market with mainly weak players. According to Konstantine Belov, media […]
Rambler addresses Russian press rumours of delisting
Prof-Media has issued a formal response to the rumours circulating in the Russian press concerning their delisting on the London Stock Exchange. Prof-Media is the majority share holder in Rambler Media, the company operating the Rambler search engine portal in Russia and the majority shareholder in the PPC engine Begun.ru. In December 2006 and January […]
Russian .SU increases stakes in ICANN fight
As reported in February, ICANN is continuing attempts to delete the .SU (Soviet Union) domain extension. Pressure has increased after the successful decommissioning of the .YU (Yugoslavia) address this week, where operators for the new extensions .RS for Serbia and .ME for Montenegro agreed to migrate existing users. ICANN has again, “urged the current .SU […]
Russian Yandex removes backLink operator
This week Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia decided to remove the ability for webmasters to view incoming links to their sites (or backlinks as they are commonly known). Previously this had been possible by two methods, the first using a search operator [link=”www.domain.com”] and secondly through their advanced search page. The function was […]
Fastest growth in China, Russia and South Korea domains
According to Verisign, InsideDomaining reports, the Top 3 countries with the highest growth rate for their country code top-level-domain extensions are the following: 1. China: .cn (402% increase) 2. Russia: ru 3. South Korea: .kr China (.cn) has now become the fifth most popular country code extension globally, as Yahoo! finance points out, this was […]