This interview is a little old but well worth watching if you are interested in the Russian Internet. It was carried out in April this year by the Russia Today network with Vladimir Dolgov, Head of Google Russia. RT do not offer embedded video, so just click this link or the image below.

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This week Facebook has managed to throw MySpace from the No.1 spot, putting “considerably distance” between the two sets of audience figures. Facebook drew a massive 132m viewers in June while MySpace managed just 117.5m. The reason for this success? Facebook decided to embrace the multilingual audience and deliver the service in a range of [...]

On the 27th July, Radio Station Ekho Moskvi (Moscow Echo) invited the ex-Managing Director of Rambler for an interview on the latest deal between Rambler and Google. This is an English translation of the show you can watch below:

Igor Ashmanov started his interview with answering some questions about his web service, search engine analyzer http://www.analyzethis.ru/, [...]

One of the key advantages for a multilingual marketer is the broad perspective of more than one culture, environment or market. Ideas from one can easily be ported to another, giving you a significant advantage over those developing from scratch. Look at YouTube and RuTube, the latter recently selling for $15m.
This isn’t new. Television companies [...]

For the third year running Moscow has topped the list of the most expensive cities worldwide. Tokyo took second place with London dropping to third position.
The famous list is drawn up each year by the human resources firm Mercer as a guide for expatriate expenses. It attempts to measure usual expenses for over 200 items [...]

Bloomburg are reporting on the comments made by Vladimir Dolgov, Head of Google Russia, that online ad sales will jump fivefold in Russia to reach $1 billion in 2010.
In 2010, Google believes its operations in Russia could be tapping a billion dollar Internet advertising market. 2007 saw Russia grow to a $200 million bonanza in [...]

Bulgaria has entered an official application today to ICANN for the IDN extension .бг (.bg).
ICANN had raised the issue of IDN extensions at their recent Paris Conference, with a view to introducing a “limited number of non-contentious IDN ccTLDs, while an overall long-term IDN ccTLD policy is being developed” (DomainNews).
A representative of Bulgaria’s Governmental [...]

Further news growth in the Russian market has come from Renaissance Capital, the Moscow based investment group. Their automotive and transport team predict that Russia will be the #1 car market in Europe in 2008 with 3.3mln cars being sold.
Eduard Faritov, Transport Analyst at Renaissance Capital, said: “We are observing incredible change in demand [...]

$644bln turnover and 20% growth will make Russia the largest retail market in Europe, according to market researchers IRG and IMSG. During the course of this year Russian retail sales will overtake its counterparts in Germany, France and the UK. The sector is expected to grow by a staggering 27.5% this year and by 20% [...]

Dmitry Medvedev, President of the Russian Federation has thrown his weight behind the campaign for a new Cyrillic IDN for the country. The Moscow Times reports that this is part of a new drive to promote Russian as a global language.
He said 300 million people worldwide used Russian media and that a Cyrillic domain name [...]