Every Spring since 1996, for three days, the Russian Internet incarnates into a sprawling mass of living high tech energy — the Russian Internet Forum at Lesnye Dali (Far Woods), a hotel complex located in a picturesque pine forest 38 km northeast from Moscow.
From Moscow and far beyond, RIF attracts virtually all those who count in the industry — including top managers from the leading Russian Internet players who come to be seen, speak and rub elbows with peers, trend setters, new talent and anybody who seeks to deliver or shake things up online.
According to RIF organizers, over 7,000 visitors attended the event in late April this year, including 3,500 company representatives. Visitors were mainly from Moscow but at least 20% were from the regions.
“RIF is a very broad, interesting event covering an extremely wide range of topics,” comments Tobias Schubert, e-commerce manager at Otto Group Russia. “I liked the atmosphere which was a combination of intellectually stimulating discussions and lectures and casual networking.”
“Face to face interaction with clients and business prospects is very important in the advertising business,” says Zinaida Koltsova, director of media product sales at Begun, a leading Russian ad network. “Attending RIF is also a matter of image. Key players just can’t afford not to be seen here.”
“Our target clients concentrate at this event,” confirms a representative of Webmoney, a major Russian electronic currency company with international ambitions. “We meet many merchants who have been considering working with us but still have not made a committment, and contact at RIF brings a measureable commercial effect.”
Where investors meet startups
RIF is also the place to be for entrepreneurs and investors. Hundreds came to RIF this year as in the previous years.
FastLane Ventures, a Moscow-based incubator founded in 2010 by two Western businessmen, Pascal Clément and Oskar Hartmann, co-organized a conference on investing in startups. Prominent venture funds took part in it, including Almaz Capital, a Russian fund counting Cisco among its backers, E-Venture Capital Partners, the venture branch of the German distance-selling giant Otto Group, Russia Partners, a private equity firm with over $1 billion of assets under management in Russia and CIS, Finam, a Russian financial conglomerate, and AddVenture, one of the most dynamic funds on the Russian Internet scene over the last two years.
“We need to show what we do,” says Tatyana Tsvetkova, Development director at FastLane Ventures. Through classic startup pitches and less formal contacts, the incubator met with a number of entrepreneurs at the event and has continued further discussions with some of them—a developer of geolocation services, a social commerce startup, and another one developing solutions for interior design.
“Our primary, however unofficial task, was to attract talent,” says Tsvetkova. But the current tension on the labour market doesn’t make this task easy. “Between the gurus and the greenhorns, there are not many to recruit at RIF,” she adds.
Victim of its own success
RIF shows signs of being a victim of its own success, however. “Unfortunately almost all the conferences and stands were simply overcrowded,” says Schubert.
“RIF has become so big that people cannot really appreciate the value of communicating with each other,” comments prominent Internet industry figure Andrey Zotov. “It appears the time has come for a change in the format, with a separate conference reserved for top-managers holding strategic discussions.”
Zotov founded RIF in 1996, when the Internet was embryonic in Russia. He is also a co-founder of East-West Digital News.
While a number of conferences offered valuable discussions and announcements, others did not seem to reach the expected level of professionalism. “The bigger the conference gets, the less interesting it becomes,” comments Alexander Baderko, another East-West Digital News co-founder. “The last straw was when a participant of the conference on social media said that Facebook was ‘too young a company’ to offer clear technological perspectives.”
No interpreters available
Unlike international analogues, there were very few foreign participants at RIF — less than 1%, according to the organizers.
“The difference with industry events in Germany is obvious. I enjoyed here a family atmosphere which is absent in industry events in my country,” says Claudia Schaefer, online marketing manager E-Commerce at BonPrix, part of the Otto Group.
But Schaefer, who flew to Russia especially to attend the event, didn’t find the interpreters that had been promised by RIF organizers. “We planned to offer interpretatation services but unfortunately the provider did not fulfill its obligations,” said Sergey Plugotarenko to East-West Digital News. Mr Plugotarenko is the director of the Russian Association of Electronic Communiations, which co-organized of the event.
