Gambling companies have welcomed the news that poker is now officially classified as a “sport” in Russia following an order signed March 26 by the Federal Sports Agency head, Vyacheslav Fetisov. On June 26, 2007, Seven-Card Stud Poker, Omaha and Texas Hold’em were officially included in the All-Russia Registry of Sports.
“This game doesn’t have any [...]

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The 2008 Russian Internet or Runet Awards were given away last week in a lavish ceremony held in Moscow. Russian singers and celebrities were among the audience as leading players in Russian internet industry were awarded for their contribution to the development of the Russian segment of the internet.
The awards have been running since 2004 [...]

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Guy Kawasaki, arguably the interwebs most famous VC, has launched a Russian section for his news aggregator – Alltop. As Chris Shipley, the chairman of Guidewire Group and executive producer of DEMO explains in Guy’s blog:
“Alltop is deceptively simple. The site gathers up the best suggestions from the most active social web users and compiles [...]

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RBC Daily reports on the latest moves by the Russian government to adopt the first ever legal definition of “Internet media”. It will join print media, radio and TV in the Russian law “About Media” and receive the same legal recognition.
According to Senator Vladimir Slutskera, Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Industrial Policy, under the [...]

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According to Interfax, Googles proposed deal to puchase the contexual ad provider, Begun.ru, for $140m was shot down by the Russian Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) on Thursday.
The reason cited has been a lack of clear information on the “individuals who can exert influence on the activity of the Google group, as well as a list of [...]

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Google’s recent change of policy in the UK to allow PPC advertising for online gaming has re-opened the issue in the Russian markets. This Friday Google started to allow online gaming advertisers to again participate openly in their PPC program, Adwords.
As NewMediaAge reports, the initial ban was enforced as part of a company-wide, global move [...]

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According to the MindShare Interaction research agency, advertising in Russia grew 73% to $260m in the first half of 2008 and may top $600m this year.
Foreign automakers now spend an average of 20% of their Russian ad budgets online, underscoring the huge preference media buyers now place on the Internet at the expense of traditional [...]

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The first ever Russian lawsuit brought against a BlackHat SEO was dismissed this week in St. Petersberg. The SEO in question had used trademarked terms belonging to other companies in the META tags of their clients’ sites. This was done in an attempt to rank their clients in the SERPs for these trademarked terms. Under [...]

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This interview is a little old but well worth watching if you are interested in the Russian Internet. It was carried out in April this year by the Russia Today network with Vladimir Dolgov, Head of Google Russia. RT do not offer embedded video, so just click this link or the image below.

Technorati Tags: Google, [...]

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On the 27th July, Radio Station Ekho Moskvi (Moscow Echo) invited the ex-Managing Director of Rambler for an interview on the latest deal between Rambler and Google. This is an English translation of the show you can watch below:

Igor Ashmanov started his interview with answering some questions about his web service, search engine analyzer http://www.analyzethis.ru/, [...]

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