The Russian law “About the State Regulation of Activities on Gambling” comes into effect tomorrow, forcing many casinos to shut their doors. .
Although Vladimir Putin could not have foreseen the economic crisis when the law was proposed in 2006, the implementation could not have come at a worse time for Russia. An estimated 400′000 [...]

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Josh Catone over at SitePoint reports that Firefox has decided to drop Google as their default search option for Yandex. This will effect all the versions they release for the Russian market. According to Mozilla General Counsel Harvey Anderson, the reason behind the change was a study of Russian user behavior conducted by Mozilla that [...]

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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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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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Bulgaria has entered an official application today to ICANN for the IDN extension .бг (.bg).
ICANN had raised the issue of IDN extensions at their recent Paris Conference, with a view to introducing a “limited number of non-contentious IDN ccTLDs, while an overall long-term IDN ccTLD policy is being developed” (DomainNews).
A representative of Bulgaria’s Governmental [...]

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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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$644bln turnover and 20% growth will make Russia the largest retail market in Europe, according to market researchers IRG and IMSG. During the course of this year Russian retail sales will overtake its counterparts in Germany, France and the UK. The sector is expected to grow by a staggering 27.5% this year and by 20% [...]

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