Sergei Solonin, general director and co-owner of Qiwi, a leading, NASDAQ-listed Russian payment operator, announced that his company plans to issue a Russian crypto-currency, called the BitRuble, in 2016. Qiwi intends to use either the Blockchain technology, which is the foundation for the Bitcoin, or the Bitshares financial platform, which is a sort of decentralized crypto-currency …
Russian banks now offer customers a new way to pay for purchases. In mid-July, Alfa Bank started selling Austrian Watch2pay watches, and it was soon followed by Center-Invest, based in Rostov-on-Don. Gazprombank and AK Bars in Kazan, however, introduced the gadget even earlier, in April 2013. The watch has a built-in bank card with MasterCard …
Payment watches take first steps in Russian market Read More
The new Google icon was largely inspired by the work of Russian designer Denis Kortunov, US online publication Daily Tech revealed last week. Back in 2008 Kortunov was among a handful of designers to try their hand at a reimagining of Google’s visual identity. It is immediately apparent that the 2015 Google icon is a only “minimally tweaked …
Chinese online vendors have won the lion’s share of Russia’s cross-border e-commerce business over competitors from Europe and the U.S., spurred on by the ruble’s continued decline and a recession that has prompted Russians to shop for less expensive items. Chinese firms took 65 percent of Russian online orders from abroad in 2014, according to a report by the East-West Digital News. “In 2014, Russians placed about 50 …
Russian entrepreneurs have launched something similar to Handy, the U.S. home-cleaning service. In the past year, Qlean has attracted more than $327,000 in investment, and in the near future the young ambitious service plans to expand to Asia. The founders of Qlean take their inspiration from the success of the world-renowned car service, Uber. “We …
In the middle of July the Telegram messenger created by Pavel Durov, founder of Russia’s largest social network, Vkontakte, was subjected to a series of large-scale DDOS attacks. They caused the application to breakdown all over the world. Shortly before, the application had been deleted from the Google Play store for several hours due to complaints …
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law a controversial bill that allows citizens to demand that internet search engines remove links to personal information deemed “false” and “irrelevant,” as well as to that distributed in violation of the law. The law on the so-called “right to be forgotten,” signed by Putin on July 14, …
New documents provided by former American secret service employee-turned whistleblower Edward Snowden claim that the U.S. and UK security services have been carrying out attacks against antivirus developers around the world, including Russian company Kaspersky Lab. On June 23 the American news site The Intercept cited documents belonging to former American secret service employee Edward Snowden as saying that America’s …
NSA and GHCQ targeted Kaspersky Lab and other antivirus developers, say Snowden documents Read More
Last week, public attention was once again drawn to one of the most secretive and controversial figures of the Russian IT industry – Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of the prominent anti-virus company. Immediately after Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. and British security services had worked to subvert the company’s anti-virus software to track users …
In June 2015 Russia launched the comprehensive project BrosayemKurit.rf (translation: Let’s Quit Smoking). The country celebrated World No Tobacco Day on May 31 with the release of another mobile application, “Smoke Free Area.” With the app a user can take a photo of an establishment where the ban on smoking in public places is violated and send …
No smoking, please: Russian mobile health technologies Read More
Startup Village, a major industry event held last week at the Skolkovo international tech hub, greeted more than 10,000 participants: Russian and foreign entrepreneurs, investors, venture fund representatives and government officials, including Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Over the course of two days, the Startup Village came as the ultimate stage of a road show through …
A new protest monitoring system was launched in Russia on May 18, 2015. It is called Laplace’s Demon, in honor of Pierre-Simon Laplace’s 19th century mathematical experiment. The system’s author is scientist Evgeny Venedictov, the director of the Center for Research on Legitimacy and Political Protest. Venedictov does not hide the fact that his creation was inspired …
New protest monitoring system to track Facebook and Twitter Read More
