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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

I came across this post on the expat.ru mailing list and it made me laugh. It definitely gives you some insight into Russian life, although some of the in-jokes are directed at the ex-pats living here.
1. You answer the phone with a deadpan “allo-a.”

2. When crossing the street, you sprint.
3. In winter, you [...]

[Read more →]

The Russian Scientific Research Institute of the Development of Social Network, which operates the .RU extension announced this week that the 1 millionth domain name has now been sold.
The domain in question? Hanti.ru, registered by Cyberbox Limited on Monday, September 17.
This news comes hot on the heels of a recent Verisign report that showed [...]

[Read more →]