Founder of Russian social network Vkontakte Pavel Durov has filed a lawsuit in the US against his former partners in the project and a fund with a stake of almost 50 percent in Vkontakte. He accuses them of fraud and of extorting a stake in the instant messaging application Telegram. Durov and his two companies …
Reacting to the loss of traction of the once widely popular instant messenger ICQ, Russia’s Mail.ru Group earlier this month released a fully redesigned version of the program. Android users are the first to enjoy the new messaging and VoIP functions. The updated version offers free video calls, group chats and stickers. Users can also …
ICQ shed more than 30% of its audience in 2013, reported its owner Mail.ru Group, an LSE-listed Russian Internet group, in its financial report for 2013. The global instant messaging service’s monthly user total shrank to 11 million across the world as of this past December, a notable contraction from 15.9 million a year before. …
ICQ quickly loses users, Telegram gets traction among international instant messengers Read More
Keeping with their prior attempts to keep Westerners as far away as possible from Russians’ Internet activity, Russian secret service agents have recently advised regional government officials across Russia to use domestic webmail services and stay away from overseas ones, such as Google’s Gmail. The recommendation, still off the record, came earlier this month from …
Telegram, a recently launched instant messenger, offers users encryption protection too sophisticated even for security agencies to overcome, the Russian business daily Vedomosti quoted Pavel Durov, a prominent Russian businessman, as saying. The founder and CEO of VKontakte, Russia’s number one social network, Durov is also the mastermind behind the Telegram project, which came online …
New instant messenger Telegram protected even from spy intrusions – Pavel Durov Read More
The Bank of Russia has fined the Mail.ru Group 500,000 rubles (approximately $15,000) for refusing to provide data on users’ personal messages. A leading, LSE-listed Russian Internet company, the Mail.ru Group controls the country’s leading webmail service with one of every two mail boxes in Russia. In August 2013, the Federal Service for Financial Markets …
Mail.ru Group fined for refusing to divulge private correspondence Read More
MTT, a Russian telecom group owned by VTB and former telecommunication minister Leonid Reiman, announced last week the launch of a Skype-like VoIP application named ‘Beam.’ The company stated it had invested 100 million rubles (approximately $3 million) in the project, which is based on MTT’s own VoIP platform for call rerouting, billing, and integration …
Russia’s MTT launches Skype-like VoIP app with international ambitions Read More
Ruslan Gattarov, a Russian senator who has recently become an advocate for the privacy of Russian Internet users, continues his crusade against what he perceives as the unlawful actions of the world’s largest Internet companies in Russia. In late August, he asked the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation and Roskomnadzor, the key federal …
Google and Facebook taken to task, Twitter suspected of user data misuse Read More
Digital Fortress, a US-based software developer with Russian roots, rolled out in mid-August its inaugural mobile app, an English-language instant messenger named Telegram. The app is now available on iTunes. Digital Fortress owner Pavel Durov, who is also the founder of Russia’s largest social network Vkontakte (VK.com), claimed that his company’s first product was launched …
VKontakte founder launches Telegram, a new instant messenger service Read More
Leading Russian Internet company Mail.Ru Group announced last week that an adapted version of the homepage of its webmail service Mail.ru will be used by default in smart TVs manufactured by LG. At the revamped Mail.Ru homepage, smart TV users will be able to check the program schedule and their Mail.Ru email accounts, search the web, …
LG Smart TVs to use Mail.Ru as the default homepage Read More
RBC, one of Russia’s largest media groups in the online, television, print media, hosting and domain name registration segments, is restructuring its B2C Internet assets, the group’s press service stated in an exchange with East-West Digital News. Managed by Media Mir, a company within the group, these assets will be reorganized into three distinct segments. …
Among several other recent enhancements, Mail.ru announced last week that its webmail service now supports the Internet Message Access Protocol. Commonly known as IMAP, this protocol now allows Mail.ru users who have email accounts with other services – including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and the webmail services of Yandex and Rambler – to send and receive …
