Business Watch
Russia’s first conference on artificial intelligence, “AINL: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language,” was held in St. Petersburg on 26 May 2012, sponsored and co-hosted by i-Free in partnership with RVC, NLPSeminar and Game|Changers.
Market leaders Mail.ru, Vkontakte and Yandex, together with a further 40 speakers and 400 guests, will debate Russia's digital future at the digital conference, DLD Moscow, taking place from 27-29 May 2012, and is being held in the Russian metropolis for the first time. Russia is one of the fastest growing and leading European digital markets, as demonstrated by the user numbers and the capitalisation of internet giants such as Mail.ru, Vkontakte and Yandex. Among the 40 speakers will be Dmitry Grishin (CEO, Mail.Ru Group), Pavel Durov (CEO, Vkontakte) and Arkady Volozh (CEO, Yandex). Additionally, entrepreneurs, creative minds and experts from the international DLD community, such as Italian designer Lapo Elkann, Matt Michelsen of Lady Gaga's littlemonsters.com or Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, will also be speaking at the conference.
Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Yury Trutnev. Presenting a flask of water drawn from prehistoric lake under Russia’s Vostok research station in the Antarctic to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Mr. Trutnov said experts believe it may be from a million to 30 million years old.
TexDrive announced the start of its first leading high-tech business acceleration programme in Eastern Europe and CIS to produce global and impactful companies from the best start-ups of the region following such examples as Yandex, IPG Photonics, Mail.ru Group, Skype, Kaspersky Labs and Badoo. For the first programme, TexDrive has selected seven high potential projects from over 500 applicants. The programme participants cover a wide range of industries including medical, Internet, software, energy and industrial automation.
The biggest Russian search engine company has acquired SPB Software, an international developer of software for mobile devices and carriers. According to the daily Vedomosti, Yandex has paid around $38 million for the acquisition of the company. Yandexis a developer of software for mobile devices and carriers, having a 64% market share in Russia, ranking as the 5th largest search engine worldwide with more than 3 billion searches, or 1.7% of global search as of last September. It attracts more than 56 million users from all over the world. Its web site is also present in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Turkey. Another company, Yandex Labs, is a wholly owned division of Yandex that is located in the San Francisco Bay Area. The closest competitors to Yandex in the Russian market are Google, Mail.ru and Rambler. Although services like Google and Yahoo! are also used by Russian users and have Russian-language interfaces, Google has about 21.9% of search engine generated traffic.