The Skolkovo project, in partnership with Cisco, handed out 5.25 million rubles ($175,000) to three winners of their jointly sponsored Skolkovo Innovation Prize competition. Moscow inventor Evgeny Smetanin, 50, walked away with first prize of 3 million rubles ($100,000) for his project on transforming children’s toys into modular robotic playing devices.
Bloomberg reported yesterday from “a person with direct knowledge of the matter” that Yuri Milner, the Russian businessman who created DST, completed the financing for DST’s new fund, DST Global II, having raised about $1 billion. Alisher Usmanov, who backed DST Global I, said last month he is “just a financial investor” in DST Global …
Soyuz-Telecom, a WiMAX operator little known until now, announced last month the extension of its coverage to Vsevolozhsk, a city in the St. Petersburg region. The company, founded in 2007, now covers 17 small cities across the country. It has not, however, disclosed its number of subscribers. Russian entrepreneur Theophan Bondarenko owns a majority stake …
Yandex looks to raise up to $1.1 billion offering 52 million shares between $24 to $25 a share, up from an initially considered price of $20 to $22, commanding a market value around $7 billion. Yandex will list on the NASDAQ under the symbol YNDX starting from May 23, 2011. In light of this IPO, East-West …
Although Yandex is best known internationally for its search engine, its other services — some of which are very far from search — are used everyday by millions of Russian-speaking Internet users. This is why the company deserves to be named an integrated Internet group rather than a search service. East-West Digital News is happy …
Yandex assets: A dominating player far beyond the search market Read More
Had not Sergey Brin emigrated with his family to the United States at the age of 6, his destiny might have perhaps resembled those of Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, the Russian mathematicians who founded Yandex. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Volozh and Segalovich were rather typical representatives of …
From startup to IPO: How Yandex became Russia’s search giant Read More
1990 Two information search systems — the International Classifier of Inventions and the Goods and Services Classifier — were developed in DOS by Arcadia, the company founded by Arkady Volozh and Arkady Borkovsky. These systems provided the foundation for Yandex’s technology.
Rostelecom, Russia’s national telecommunications operator, opened its first digital signature center yesterday, reports CNews.ru, a website covering IT and telecommunications issues. Rostelecom offers USB keys designed to facilitate access to e-government services. The keys cost 600 rubles—a little more than $20.
MTS, one of Russia’s leading mobile operators, announced the launch of a cloud-based distribution system for multimedia content — the first such experiment in Russia and CIS countries. The announcement was made last week at Sviaz-Expocomm, a major international event of the telecommunications industry held each year in Moscow.
Moscow-based startup incubator Fast Lane Ventures has just launched Jizo.ru, a metasearch engine for airline tickets. Jizo.ru aggregates ticket information “from a myriad of sources,” says the company, including the booking systems of leading travel agencies, airlines and booking sites. Its simplified, uncluttered interface allows users to select airline tickets by two main criteria: date …
Fast Lane Ventures launches airline ticket search engine Jizo.ru Read More
Russian Venture Company (RVC), a state-owned fund of funds, participated indirectly in a $20 million round of financing, announced last week, for Clearspring Technologies, a US-based online data giant. This fourth round brings Clearspring’s total funding to $58 million since its creation in 2004. Clearspring is the maker of the AddThis button that facilitates content …
The Russian Satellite Communications Company (RSCC), a state-owned satellite communications operator, and Eutelsat, the leading European satellite operator, announced last week their plans to jointly launch a new direct-to-home (DTH) satellite to 36° East in 2015.
