John Rose, CEO of Rose Creative Strategies, writes for the Moscow Times on the subject of using reward schemes to encourage sales during these dark economic times. Interestingly he suggests cross-overs from traditional marketing into the internet, as “penetration is now sufficient in Russia to allow companies to launch national loyalty promotions inexpensively by fulfilling [...]

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Never one to shy away from accusations of sexism, the classic “beauty contest” is a reliable technique in the Russian marketer’s toolkit. Even search giants such as Mail.ru have jumped on the idea with their Miss Mail.ru competitions.
In an effort to bring some sexy back to Russian nuclear power, the industry launched a competition [...]

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After several months of speculation, ICANN have awarded Russia the first non-latin domain extension; .РФ (.RF). This will be available from next July according to Kommersant, the Russian newspaper
The .РФ zone domains are expected to cover roughly 20 percent of current .RU, forecasted Dmitry Ufaev, the managing partner at RBC Hosting Center. Some 1.75 million [...]

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As announced earlier this year, Yandex has finally opened their new offices in Silicon Valley, called Yandex Labs. Vish Makhijani, who previously held the position of Senior Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo Search, has joined Yandex in the position of President and CEO of their new US technology and business development facility.
“We are [...]

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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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Yandex, the leading Russian search engine has signed a deal with Kaspersky Anti-Virus to bundle their software free of charge into their desktop application, Ya Online.
Kaspersky has an understandably strong following in Russia, where it was founded in 1997. Although the companies head office is still in Moscow, they have expanded globally with offices in [...]

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Google.ru seems to have a broken link this morning. When you choose to visit Google.com in English it takes you to http://www.google.com/ncr - resulting in the following error page:

Not Found
The requested URL /ncr&ei=bNXgR7KsKo6iwgGmuKHVCA&redir_esc=www5 was not found on this server.

Of course this isn’t a problem for anyone searching in Russian but annoying for those of us [...]

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Reah Guevarra over at Google Maven stumbled upon a great advert by the Google team in Moscow. A massive Gmail art project involving 162 meters of gray tape, 45 lego pieces, 12 cans of spray paint, 2 kilograms of millet porridge, 1 mop, and 1 saw!

It will be interesting to see Google’s level of involvement [...]

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The third annual “Internet and Business” conference has been announced this week. CIB-2008 is by far the largest conference in Russia and attracted over 2000 visitors last year. It is attended by almost all the major internet companies in Russia, including of course the search giants Yandex, Begun, Mail.ru, Rambler and Google.

The conference is free [...]

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Yakov Sadchikov, CEO of Quintura, reports that the Russian group Finam has invested $30m US for a 10% share in social site Badoo.
The funds are to bring the site over to Russia, where social applications have grown strongly over the last year. There are now an estimated 10 million users in the Russian social market.
Finam [...]

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