Posts tagged:

russia

From Russia With Leaders – Good 2 Work With

by Miikka Kukkosuo, March 12, 2010 — Leave a Comment

The Club of Leaders Good 2 Work with seems to be one of the well-kept secrets of Russia (and would have stayed so, had it not been registered on ArcticIndex). Good 2 Work is a virtual place (or sort of a closed social network) for executives and entrepreneurs of different levels and from different industries and countries. It is meant as tool for leaders to learn from and about each other in the field of business leadership. The primary means are professionally pre-recorded video conversations.

The club was established in April 2008 by Yuri Barzov, who was a partner with the executive search companies Ward Howell and Spencer Stuart. Yuri has also founded the 200+ thousands strong Russian learning community of managers, E-xecutive.

Continue reading »

Online Social Language Learning With CorrectMyText.com

by Miikka Kukkosuo, August 26, 2009 — Leave a Comment
CorrectMyText.com is a new social web service from Moscow, Russia. The service is built to help people learn foreign languages with the help of others online.
How it works is tha users register to the site (well, those having a Facebook account can just use Facebook Connect to log in instantly) and enter a piece of text, for example an essay, resume, letter, or a blog-post, in foreign language. When submitting the text, one can specify the level of language skills required from the proofreader, the number of checks to be made. Users can also request a recorded spoken version of the corrected text to  to practice pronunciation. All the tools are built within the website.

CorrectMyText logoCorrectMyText.com is a new social web service from Moscow, Russia. The service is built to help people learn foreign languages with the help of others online. Continue reading »

Russian Odnoklassniki Hits 30 Million Users

by Antti Vilpponen, March 2, 2009 — Leave a Comment

odnoklassnikiRussian social networking site Odnoklassniki.ru has hit 30 million registered users, according to Quintura. Odnoklassniki is a relatively young social network, only 3 years old. The site was launched in March 2006.

Odnoklassniki has some interesting statistics as well. It has about 8 million visitors each day. Odnoklassniki’s biggest competitor in the Russian market is Vkontakte, which has some 28 million registered users and 1.4 billion pageviews per day. According to the Russian TNS Web Index Vkontakte had 13.09 million visitors a month, which is slightly higher than Odnoklassniki’s monthly audience.

The Russian social networking market is the fourth largest in Europe after UK, Germany and France.

Yandex Revenues Up 80% From 2007

by Antti Vilpponen, February 9, 2009 — Leave a Comment

yandexArkady Volozh, the CEO of the Russian Yandex.ru, has revealed in a conference held last week that their revenues in 2008 are 80% higher than in 2007. Revenues in 2008 were said to be more than $300 million. Yandex has been closely developing itself to become the local Google. This goes hand in hand with the share of revenues. 85% of Yandex’ revenues came from contextual advertising both on Yandex’ sites as well as partner sites, according to Quintura.

Other figures also confirm that Yandex is truly becoming the dominant advertising solution in Russia. In 2008 it had more than 100 000 advertisers, up 50% from 2007. Quintura also comments that Yandex’ search volume is increasing steadily as the Russia heads into economic downturn. Yandex has some 54% marketshare against Google’s 32% in the Russian market.

MobileMonday Peer Awards Semifinalists Chosen

by Miikka Kukkosuo, January 20, 2009 — 1 Comment

Mobilemonday Peer Awards 2009 logoMobileMonday Peer Awards 2009 mobile innovation contest semifinalists have been chosen.  From the Nordic and Baltic area, the following firms were selected by their MoMo chapters.

One might ask, however, where are the Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian participants?! There were some interesting startups applying in of those chapters as well, but none are on the semifinalist list (at least on Monday evening) – the chapters didn’t select anyone? Either way, it is good to see the newly-launched Estonian MoMo chapter sent their nominee this year (last year the Helsinki chapter chose Estonian Fromdistance).

Nevertheless, as explained before, there will next be a further selection round by an international virtual jury to select the 20 finalists to the February 16th Barcelona MobileMonday event. Anybody from our readers in the jury?

Russian Investment Bank to IPO FriendFinder Networks

by Antti Vilpponen, January 5, 2009 — 2 Comments

While we cover the startup market, we do keep an eye on the investors as well and this is a story from the East that needs to be told. Renaissance Capital, a leading Russian investment bank, will be the sole underwriter of the $460 million FriendFinder IPO in the United States.

FriendFinder is the parent company of the notorious AdultFriendFinder ads that can be found all over the internet. Penthouse is also one of the products of the company and has one previous failed IPO attempt behind it from 1993. The company is in good health as it’s net revenues for the first nine months of 2008 were $262.4 million, resulting in operating income of $36.1 million and EBITDA of $66.6 million.

Renaissance Capital, head quartered in Cyprus (like many Russian companies), has been relatively active in the startup scene lately. They were the one of the underwriters of the Yandex IPO, which was later postponed due to market conditions.

Furthermore in the internet sector, Renaissance Capital was an advisor in the sale of 30 percent of Mail.ru stock for $165 million to Naspers of South Africa in January 2007. Mail.ru is the one of the largest internet portals in Russia. Renaissance Capital also played an advisory role in the 55% acquisition of Rambler by Prof-Media in October 2006.

BarCamp Baltics 2009 Gathering in Latvia in February

by Miikka Kukkosuo, December 30, 2008 — Leave a Comment

BarCamp Baltics 2009 will be held in Riga, Latvia, between 6th and 8th of February, 2009. That’s the place to be if you’re interested in Baltic and Russian ideas, views, and cooperation around mobile and web projects.

BarCamp is an international network of conferences organized around different themes, based on the idea that participants will generate the presentations and discussions for and in the events themselves. BarCamp Baltics brings together social networking and new media specialists, bloggers, podcasters, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, marketers, and mobile Internet professionals and enthusiasts.

The event will feature 5 to 6 simultaneous sessions, including presentations, workshops, messages and discussions, 30 minutes long each. Between 75 to 95 presentations in total will be held during a day. Participants can choose any sessions to attend and also the topics they want to present, and there will be presentations both in English and in Russian. Around 500 to 600 participants from the Baltic States and CIS, Central and Western Europe, and Americas are expected to be present.

BarCamp Baltics aims to to stimulate the development of new IT and media projects in Baltic states and CIS, and enhance networking and provide connections for international commercial and non-commercial joint projects. BarCamp Baltics 2008 gathered together more than 500 people from 23 countries, and was supported by the biggest media in Latvia.

BarCamp’s been arranged also in Helsinki, and there are a few other ones coming up: Odense in January and Århus in March, in Denmark, and in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May.

Microsoft Launches Tools For Startups – BizSpark

by Antti Vilpponen, November 13, 2008 — 2 Comments

BizsparkLast Friday, Microsoft launched a new program called Bizspark that offers startups of different ages and stages tools to take care of their software and hosting requirements. Technopolis Ventures, Veraventure, The Finnish Software Entrepeneurs Association and Venture Cup has partnered with Microsoft in Finland to accept participants into the program.

Startups must meet the following requirements to be accepted into the program:

  • Be actively engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core of its current or intended business
  • Be privately held
  • Be in business for less than 3 years and
  • Have less than 1 million USD annual turnover.

Despite being a Mac fanatic, I have to give it to Microsoft for pulling this off. They are sponsoring a wide range of products that suit many companies working in the internet space especially. Also, the packages being offered are tailored for companies in different stages of their growth and thus are also bundled together with their capability to pay for the software.

For more information, visit Microsoft Bizspark. You can also find your partners in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Baltics through this link.

Web2People – the Russian YCombinator

by Antti Vilpponen, September 4, 2008 — 2 Comments

I talked a while back to Gleb Kaplun, a Russian investor from St. Petersburg, about their company Web2People. We followed up on that and I got really excited with the possibilities it creates. Web2People is a venture company established to help young innovators start their business with the very basic resources and fundamentals. The focus on the innovation is on Internet services and web applications.

Web2People offers companies the physical office space and resources to get the idea of the ground. Once somewhat in the air, Web2People has mentors and professionals to help the entrepreneurs to make the idea fly. Web2People can help the companies with anywhere from paperwork to contacting investors from Europe to get further financing.

Although, Web2People does not give any funding for these companies, they consider themselves seed stage investors as they provide the basic facilities needed to get the idea off the ground. Thus, they don’t see themselves as another incubator without ambitious goals. The first startup centre is located just north of St. Petersburg.

Web2People runs projects divided into 2 sessions and 4 seasons. Each season lasts 3 months and is very specifically documented to create achievable goals and targets. Therefore the co-operation period with Web2People is usually 6 months – the first 3 months being put into growing the product into a prototype and the last 3 months allocated for fund gathering.

All in all, a very interesting concept and a very welcome I suppose with regards to the Russian market where there isn’t that much help from the government as we are used to here in the Nordic countries. I’m guessing Gleb will see himself a good pool of interesting ideas to take to the next level.