TMT Investments announced last week that it has acquired a 10% stake in Unicell, a leading mobile application service and content provider in Israel, for 10.4 million shekels, or approximately $2.96 million. This transaction seems to mark the first investment of a Russian company in a mobile content provider outside the former USSR.
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.
Two weeks after Foursquare made available a Russian version of its service – along with versions in Bahasa Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, and Thai – a powerful Russian media group, RBC, announced it has invested $1 million in Ogorod.ru, one of the two best-known local services inspired by the Foursquare concept.
MJ Group, a newly formed Vietnamese Internet player, announced last Friday it raised $60 million from national fund IDG Ventures as well as from Rebate Networks, a German investment company, and Ru-Net, a major Russian fund. MJ Group is the result of a merger of four local Vietnamese Internet companies – e-commerce site Nhommua, location …
Germany’s Rebate Networks and Russia’s Ru-Net invest heavily in Vietnamese e-commerce Read More
Tvigle.ru, a major Russian video entertainment portal on the Russian Internet, closed a capital increase operation last week with PromSvyazCapital, the investment arm of PromSvyazBank, a leading Russian bank. PromSvyazCapital acquired a 27.7% stake for approximately $8 million, a source close to the deal told East-West Digital News.
In a pattern that exemplifies the booming nature of the Russian Internet, the market segment for web content discovery services – non-existent just months ago – is now rapidly filling with ambitious startups. The public beta version of Netflip.ru was launched in mid-August, not long after a comparable site, SurfingBird.ru, went online, as reported by East-West Digital …
Web content discovery services come to the Russian Internet Read More
The manufacturer of the soon-to-be-introduced Ë-Mobile (pronounce Yo-Mobil), the much-hyped Russian hybrid car, announced it will use the Android OS to expand the car’s functions. Ë-Mobile owners will thus benefit from a range of practical and entertainment services and will keep in touch with the latest IT technologies, according to the Ë-Mobile official blog .
NASDAQ-listed Russian search engine giant Yandex announced last Friday it fully acquired The Tweeted Times, a website offering social news services, for an undisclosed amount. Yandex aims to use the technologies developed by The Tweeted Times to enhance its search and content services with information from social networks.
Drchrono, a Silicon Valley based startup offering an electronic health record (EHR) platform for the iPad, announced last week it has received an additional $650,000 in seed funding from prominent startup investor Yuri Milner, founder of DST Global, along with venture capital firm General Catalyst.
Moscow based startup incubator Fast Lane Ventures has just launched VitaPortal.ru, a website offering health news for the general public, inspired by the success of Western sites such as WebMD.com.
Key findings: 52% of respondents use mobile Internet several times per day or “almost all the time”, 27% once or twice per day 29% started using mobile Internet less than 1 year ago Mobile Internet is used mostly for information (50%) and communication (45%) purposes. 66% of respondents visit mobile or non mobile sites, 37% check emails, …
Prominent Russian-American businessman Leonard Blavatnik has invested $9.5 million in Get Taxi, an Israeli-based mobile taxi-booking company, together with Get Taxi’s founders, which include Shahar Smirin, a former executive at Comverse in Russia.
