Fast Lane Ventures announced last week it has agreed to sell its stake in the TV and online teleshopping company Shopping Live to the German group Home Shopping Europe for an undisclosed amount. A 24-hour channel, Shopping Live offers live programming up to five hours per day. The channel is currently represented on such major …
Fast Lane sells teleshopping company to German group Read More
In a new bid to put a lid on uncensored Internet exchanges, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the post-Soviet successor of the KGB, has called for a crackdown on the “detrimental activity” of Western intelligence services in cyberspace. Speaking last week in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, at an interregional anti-terrorist panel of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), …
FSB seeks to drive Western intelligence out of blogosphere Read More
In an unprecedented experiment to ensure voting transparency, most of Russia’s 94,300 polling stations were equipped with webcams offering a live broadcast of yesterday’s voting. The broadcast, which started at midnight, Moscow time, on election day, ended after all vote counting operations were completed. It was followed by up to 400,000 simultaneous Internet users on a …
In contrast to the massive hacker attacks that took place during the parliamentary election on December 4th and over the following weeks, no notable incidents were reported yesterday when Russian voters reelected Vladimir Putin as their president – a sign perhaps of the increased legal risks and political cost for the parties involved. Using computer …
TimePad, a startup offering a range of online tools for event organizers, announced on Wednesday that it had received an investment of undisclosed size from the Rambler-Afisha group. TimePad’s functions can be compared to those of Eventbrite or Armiando. They include event publication and promotion, through existing contacts and social networks, as well as online registration, …
Online event solution startup TimePad secures investment from Rambler-Afisha Read More
While Twitter is gaining traction among the connected Russian elite, Mail.ru Group, the Russian LSE-listed Internet group, announced on Monday the launch of Futubra, a remarkably designed microblogging service. Although some observers have nicknamed it “the Russian Twitter,” Futubra seems closer to Tumblr in terms of functions, with its focus on multimedia content sharing and …
Futubra, Russia’s response to Twitter, aims to set new standard in microblogging Read More
A surprisingly explicit retweet sent from Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s Twitter account yesterday has ignited both the twitterverse and blogosphere with speculation about the behind the scenes mechanisms of the Presidential social media presence. The message, which ran, “If someone uses the expression ‘the party of rogues and thieves’ in his blog, he is a …
Medvedev Twitter account caught in Moscow political turmoil Read More
Media3, a major media publishing, commercial printing and distribution group, announced on Monday its acquisition of Delovoy Mir, Russia’s fifth largest publisher of online classifieds. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed, but Delovoy Mir Online Brand Manager Marina Zeitina told East-West Digital News that Media3 obtained a 90% stake, leaving the remaining 10% …
Media3 asserts itself as major online media publisher Read More
Mail.ru Group, a leading Russian Internet group listed on the London Stock Exchange, is developing its own microblogging service to compete with Twitter on the Russian market, Russian business daily Kommersant reported earlier this week from unnamed sources within and outside the group. The ‘Russian Twitter’ will be integrated to user accounts on the group’s …
Leading Russian financial company Finam says it has been approached by Western funds considering the acquisition of Finam’s web property Marketgid, the leading traffic exchange and affiliation platform in Russia. Finam values Marketgid at $100 million at least, Dmitry Smirnov, the CEO of the Finam Private Equity Fund, told East-West Digital News. According to Smirnov, …
Russian traffic exchange platform Marketgid eyed by Western funds Read More
DST Global, the Russian investor who already owns stakes in Facebook, Groupon, Spotify, Twitter, Zynga, and other prominent web companies, could make a bid for Yahoo jointly with US high tech fund Silver Lake and China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. The news was reported yesterday by Bloomberg from “three people with direct knowledge of the matter.” …
DST, Silver Lake and Alibaba are jointly setting their sights on Yahoo Read More
Surfingbird.ru, the first collaborative content discovery service on the Russian-language Internet, raised $2.5 million last month from Russian and French business angels. The deal brought the startup’s valuation to just under $2.5 million, a source close to the deal told East-West Digital News.
