As of this summer, Yandex launched a programme to support Russian start-ups called Yandex Start. The project selects the most promising companies in the region for a one-day seminar to look for possible cooperation and acquisition. Successful applicants receive Yandex's technologies (as APIs), computing facilities and expert advice. Two Yandex.Start sessions were held last year in September and December and as a result Yandex acquired two start-ups WebVisor and Loginza. WebVisor provides visitor behavior analysis (mouse movement, clicks, text copying etc.) that will now be integrated with Yandex's own analytics tool, Yandex.Metrica. The company was founded in 2008 by a small team of entrepreneurs from Moscow.

The other company acquired, Loginza, is a single-sign in service also founded in 2008. It supports authentication via most of the popular services like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Yandex, Mail.Ru, Vkontakte and more. Overall Loginza's authorization form is installed on 6,500 sites. Yandex plans to extend the list of supported providers and plugins and to translate Loginza to other languages.

No details of either acquisitions were disclosed. The only thing known for sure is that Yandex is hungry for more. The next seminar is already scheduled for March.  To select the participants, Yandex cooperates with various actors like start-up support programmes  Greenfield Project and Glavstart , business incubators like Higher School of Economics Business Incubator and Moscow-based Incube and the Techno Cup high-tech business competition. No formal criteria for application is outlined apart from the fields of expertise in which Yandex is interested. Those include new business models and web services for large audiences, multimedia technologies, everything connected with geo-location, new front-end solutions, technologies to study consumer behavior online and analysis of information flow.

As you can see, the company is trying to tap into the young Russian talent on virtually all fronts. This is a very positive developments for local start-ups that aim to build a service and sell it.  Being acquired by Yandex must be a strong motivator for local entrepreneurs, where acquisition practices are not commonplace and very few companies make it big. Besides, just the existence of Yandex.Start and its partners reveals a growing interest among Russian Internet businesses in innovative and fresh start-ups. Who knows what kind of innovation that might lead to.