Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia was quick to adopt Twitter. Last September they started publishing a list of the most popular Twitterati and including the service on their blog section, which shows statistics for many social platforms.
Now they have released a short PDF report which lists some key statistics for the Twitter [...]

The U.S. State Department organised a delegation of IT luminaries to visit Russia and discuss the state of the web industry. Aside from U.S. officials the group included executives from U.S. tech firms such as Twitter, Ebay and Cisco Systems. Ashton Kutcher, a regular Twitter user with over 4.5m followers bought some star quality to [...]

TNS have released the December 2009 report on the leading sites in Runet. Although the report is in Russian, the statistics are easy enough to understand.
As a nod to Alex Howard (@digiphile) who I met online at the #rustechdel, here are the findings on Russia’s leading social networks, VKontakte.ru and Odnoklassniki.ru.
VKontakte.ru
Editors Note: Vkontakte.ru [...]

Ebay, the e-commerce platform that connects buyers and sellers have announced that they will open in Russia by the end of March. Users will be able to access the site in Russian and pay for fixed-price items using PayPal, eBay’s online payments system.
Chief Executive John Donahoe said Russia’s e-commerce market is worth $5 billion [...]

Rossiiskaya Gazata reports that Internet advertising is continuing to take an ever larger share of the overall advertising market in Russia. Despite the economic downturn that has affected the overall spend.
Internet advertising in Russia grew by 6 percent in 2009, up to 19 billion roubles (approx. $630.6m USD), while the whole advertisement industry in [...]

After negotiations last year, Google won the contract away from Yandex to provide Mail.ru with contextual and organic search results. However, it’s become clear that instead of a transition from Yandex to Google, Mail.ru seems to have decided to go it alone and use results from their own in-house search engine Gogo.ru.
This shouldn’t be [...]

Kommersant reports that Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, is considering purchasing AOL’s ICQ platform at more than $200m.
ICQ has between 40m-50m registered users worldwide with the majority in Germany, Russia, Israel and Eastern Europe. In December of 2009 AOL announced that they would be restructuring and selling off some of that assets, including the [...]

When I arrived in Russia 6 years ago, it was quite a surprise to find the Russians had adopted the Chinese Zodiac. From October onwards you see references to the coming animal sign all around; in advertising, promotions and products. It is very much part of the Russian New Year tradition. I guess this makes [...]

SearchEngines.ru reports that Yandex has just signed a deal with Bing (Microsoft) to add them to their contexual network. That means Yandex Direct adverts will now be shown on the Bing network in Russia.
Microsoft has not done so well in Russia to date with their MSN brand but Bing has been quietly picking up [...]

Last week rumours of a potential Mail.ru/Google deal hit Runet. Although Google previously held a deal to provide organic and contexual advertising to the engine for 2003-2005. They lost this contract to Yandex at the end of 2005. Mail.ru confirmed the deal this morning.
Mail.ru is a rising star in Runet. It has built marketshare to [...]