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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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$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% [...]

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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 [...]

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The Associated Press reports that Turkmenistan has begun to allow private citizens to connect to the internet. Previously internet access was restricted to government employees, diplomatic posts and offices of major international companies.
The average monthly salary in Turkmenistan is $200, so it is unlikely that many can afford the price of a home connection, nor [...]

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The Casino Affiliate Convention (CAC) is one of the largest industry events on internet wagering marketing and advertising, and also covers both internet and traditional marketing. They have invited me back to their next conference in Moscow this week to speak on the topic of Social Media in Russia.
I really enjoyed the Amsterdam Conference in [...]

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It’s important to know the main user-agents and search engine spiders in Runet. This can give you information on the indexing of your site, if you understand the various roles each search engine robot plays. It can also allow you to see when your competitors or link partners are cloaking their content. Inserting the following [...]

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Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia, recently launched their own portal for webmasters, similar to Google’s Webmaster Central panel.
Once they have verified their website(s), webmasters can access more information on their site’s listing within the Yandex engine. This includes which pages/sections Yandex has indexed, site errors and ingoing/outgoing links (totals plus exact URLs). Users [...]

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