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Vkontakte, the social media website, has decided to charge for commercial applications on their platform. This move brings commercial applications into the same category as ‘sponsored’ applications, that has previously been charged. Now all businesses who want to launch applications on Vkontakte for promotional purposes will need to sign a contract with the company. They [...]
Yandex Politely Suggests You RTFM
Yandex have pushed out a new feature to help users RTFM on technical searches. For example, searching for "c++ adjacent_find" users will get a relevant snippet from the source document. Example 1: Search for term "c++ adjacent_find Example 2: Search for css term "css float" It's a smart feature and certainly returns more useful … Read More
Yandex Shows 43% Growth in Russian Market
Yandex has shown healthy growth in their 2010 financial results. The company's ruble revenue* grew 43% compared to 2009 and reached 12.5 billion rubles ($410 million**). Like Google, Yandex’s business model is based principally on contextual advertising. In 2010, contextual ads accounted for 88% of the company’s revenues. Revenues from … Read More
Russian Advertising Must Be in English – Update
Olga Razmumovskaya over at the The Moscow Times gives us an update on the current moves to clamp down on English advertising in Russia. The latest revival of the law began this month, with 3 companies having action taken against them, for using English words in their advertising material. Apparently this is only the start. According to Deputy … Read More
Industry Viewpoint: Cigar Sales in Russia
Justin Lifflander over at The Moscow Times has written a very informative article on the cigar industry in Russia. Although the industry was hit by the global downturn, sales are due to return to normal levels by 2012. Luxury items perform well in the Russian market and cigars are no exception. Russia imported 2.2m handmade cigars in 2008 but … Read More
Russian РФ (RF) Domain Names Now Available
Last Thursday the new .РФ (RF) domain name officially opened to public registration. The Registrar announced that 38'000 domains were registered that day alone, taking the total close to 200'000 registrations. The .РФ (RF) domain extension is the first of a new generation of completely Internationalised Domain Name (IDN). Although some … Read More
Google Releases Free Cyrillic Fonts
I'm a big fan of the Google Font Directory. The concept is simple, you import fonts hosted at Google in your webpages, so all users get the same result. Regardless of what fonts they have installed on that device. That means you can have designer web pages without graphical headers/titles and deliver simple (optimised) text to the search … Read More
Fined For English-Language Advertising in Russia
The Moscow Times reports that three companies are being investigated for the use of English words in their advertising. Federal law in Russia bans the use of foreign words in advertising with a potential fine of 100'000 to 500'000 rubles ($3,250 to $16,250). The companies targeted include Yaposhka-City, which owns Yaposha, a chain of Japanese … Read More
