This week Mozilla produced a new version of Firefox browser – version 3.5 – and made Yandex the default search for Russian Internet users. For several months the Mozilla company has been collecting opinions and learning the behavior of Russian Internet users. This research showed them that a lot of users would like to see [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Yandex has announced that they will now be indexing documents in languages other than Russian. Previously they had kept non-Russian content out of their index, but now accept that their user base want to search for International or non-Russian sites. They often do this via Yandex’s main rival in Russia, Google. As a stop-gap measure [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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