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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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Dmitry Medvedev, President of the Russian Federation has thrown his weight behind the campaign for a new Cyrillic IDN for the country. The Moscow Times reports that this is part of a new drive to promote Russian as a global language. He said 300 million people worldwide used Russian media and that a Cyrillic domain [...]

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Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), Russia’s largest mobile-phone company, have announced their plans to introduce 3G telephone services in several key cities. Faster wireless services will give users quicker downloads and new capabilities, such as mobile television. Earlier this month MTS announced their plans to launch 3G in Moscow by 2009 but they have now added 4 [...]

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The Russian Registry is today asking it’s customer base to vote on the possibility of a new .РФ (.RF) IDN domain name. As they write, ICANN is looking at the possibility of establishing top-level domains using international characters. The final decision on this matter will be taken at the 32nd International Public ICANN Meeting held [...]

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Rambler is often criticized for their lack of development. Google has set the pace and Yandex has more than caught up, released a wide range of applications and services. So it’s good to see some developments at Rambler, which currently holds no.2 position by Russian IP. Change has come in the form of a new [...]

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I’ve just about caught up from the C-IB 2008 ‘Internet and Business’ Conference last week. This is now the largest conference in Russia with 3500 people registering this year (up by 1500 on 2007). Take note SES and SMX, this scene is developing quickly and people are hungry for conferences. Admittedly the popularity of CIB [...]

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