Two Russian IT giants, Yandex, the leading Russian-language search engine, and Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of IT security and threat management solutions, have been ranked among the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies worldwide by U.S. business magazine Fast Company. Yandex took the 26th place in the ranking and Kaspersky Lab the 32nd.
Fast Company praises Yandex for holding a 65% share of Russian searches, having ousted Google as Firefox’s default search engine in Russia and launched an English-language service last May. The accuracy of Yandex’s results in both languages is “due to the complexity of Russian, with its Lego-like set of prefixes and roots,” which “forces Yandex to create more nuanced algorithms,” notes Fast Company.
Fast Company asserts that Kaspersky Lab has been “a magnet for Russia’s young computer geniuses, luring them away from their usual forte, hacking, to viral analysis.” This has propelled Kaspersky Lab’s rapid climb to become the world’s fourth-largest anti-malware solutions provider. Fast Company experts appraised Kaspersky Lab’s recently released mobile device protection technology: it works “without straining the batteries, ingeniously spreading the power burden throughout a cluster of phones that share the security system,” notes Fast Company.
No other Russian company figures in the Fast Company ranking, still dominated by US firms. The ranking may look conventional – though probably fair – placing Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Google and Groupon in the top six places. The ranking emphasizes, however, not just revenue growth and profit margins but also progressive business models and an ethos of creativity, revealing a variety of companies in the fields of advertising, biotech, design, fashion, mobile, and music.
