The Russian IT market is currently dominated by imports. The only exception is perhaps the IT services segment, where Russian developers account for about 60-70% of the market. When it comes to systems integration, for example, they have a better understanding of local customer needs and can adapt IT solutions to meet customer demands. As …
Battle for Russia’s IT market: Can local developers stop global giants? Read More
With a montly trading volume exceeding $1.6 billion in 2015, B2B-Center.ru, a major Russian electronic trading platform, serves more than 260,000 clients from 120 countries. Its CEO Alexey Degtyarev told East-West Digital News about this little-known, but huge market, and the impact of the crisis. He also commented on B2B-Center’s international expansion, following a recent …
Russia’s Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has begun reviewing an allusion to World War II in an advertisement for the computer game “Armored Warfare: Project Armata,” which the Russian company Mail.Ru Group launched into open beta testing last October. Mail.Ru Group says the complaint submitted to Russian regulators is a scheme by its competitors—an unsubtle jab at the …
In the previous five to ten years the number of science parks in Russia has grown rapidly. Officially, there are now more than 300. Experts, however, say a large number exist on paper only. For example, they might just be office buildings, and not centers of technological innovation and development that the country needs in …
Science parks: Russia’s secret weapon, or Potemkin village? Read More
Russian Search Marketing, a Yandex-sponsored online resource for international marketers, has published a blog series on Russian Internet user demographics. Beginning with young adults on the Internet in Russia and continuing up to the 55 and older crowd, these posts provide insight into how Russians of varying ages use the Internet. There are marked differences in what devices …
How Russians of varying ages use the Internet: A research for international marketers Read More
It was a throwaway comment, forgotten almost the minute it was written. Then again, Viktor Krasnov could hardly have predicted the trouble those three words —”God doesn’t exist” — would cause. He couldn’t have imagined that two VKontakte users would file a formal complaint to the authorities, claiming the comment “insulted” them; that police would show up at his apartment in the southern Russia …
Like, share, convict: Russian authorities target social media users Read More
Last year saw paradoxical investment trends in Russia’s young e-commerce industry, with venture and private equity investment continuing to fall while a range of offline players started or resumed online projects. On the venture side, investment reached historic lows. According to RMG Partners’ preliminary estimates, just 42 deals were closed, totalling $137 million — down …
Last week the NATO Centre of excellence in Riga unveiled the results of research into what it claims is a “preparatory information war” in Latvia but with, it emerges, much wider repercussions. One project examined 200,000 comments posted on Latvia’s three main online news portals between 29 July and 5 August 2014. It found 1.45% of those …
Europe’s new cold war turns digital as Vladimir Putin expands media offensive Read More
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in late February, Pavel Durov looked like a man in control. Dressed all in black — a nod to the character of Neo in the film The Matrix — Durov strode across the stage assertively. Like Neo, he was a programmer on a mission. Durov had come to Barcelona to announce that Telegram, the encrypted messaging service, had gathered 100 million monthly users and was gaining an impressive 350,000 …
How Telegram became the Durov brothers’ weapon against surveillance Read More
Russian Internet giant Mail.ru Group has topped a ranking of the most valuable companies operating in the Russian Internet segment for the first time, according to a rating released by the Russian version of Forbes magazine Monday. Mail.ru Group includes the mail.ru portal as well as the Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki social networks, and managed to …
Mail.ru overtakes Yandex as most valuable Russian Internet company Read More
Russian Search Marketing begins a blog series to update advertisers and webmasters on other relevant information on the status of the Russian Internet. This blog covers the top Russian websites and app downloads by platform. The Russian Internet is very unique in comparison to most countries when it comes to some of the world’s top …
In an article last week, the Financial Times wrote that the concept of the BRICS group of emerging economies was dead, arguing that Russia and Brazil’s dependence on commodities exports had led to them being usurped by tech-heavy economies Taiwan and South Korea, leading to the creation of the TICKS (Taiwan, India, China, [South] Korea and South …
TICKS not BRICS? Russia’s race to replace commodities with technology Read More
