Earlier this week the Mail.Ru Group, a top Russian Internet group listed on the London Stock Exchange, announced the US launch of My.com, which is developing English language communication and entertainment applications.
By installing its subsidiary in the heart of Silicon Valley, the group is following in the footsteps of Russian tech giants such as Yandex and Rusnano, as well as of a plethora of Russian startups, tech entrepreneurs and investors. The move may also signal a more internationally oriented strategy for the group, which has focused its core efforts so far on Russia and other Russian speaking countries.
My.com has three products: myMail, myChat and myGames. The first one is a mail application with an intuitive interface for iOS and Android that supports all popular mail services, including Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, AOL, etc. “Its 100% native code and traffic compression ensure the fast and stable operation of myMail in any situation – from reading e-mails in the metro to sending pictures from a vacation to friends and family,” states the group.
myChat presents itself as a mobile instant messenger that offers free SMS, voice and video calls. “Conversations in myChat are just as lively and casual as meeting with a friend for coffee,” according to its Russian developers.
Gaming service myGames is a growing collection of free games. One of myGames’s products, Jungle Heat, was launched earlier in the US and is now among the top 25 best-selling games on Android; the iOS-version of Jungle Heat has already been downloaded 1.5 million times and the Android-version six million times, according to the Mail.ru Group.
My.com has 10 employees in the US, the group’s press service told East-West Digital News. The company aims to leverage its existing partner network around the world to develop My.com internationally. The apps are only in English right now, “but we might localize them in other languages later,” says the group.
So far the Mail.ru Group has not developed significantly beyond Russia, putting aside the popularity of its webmail service Mail.ru and social network Odnoklassniki in several Russian-speaking countries and the success of some of its games and gambling sites well beyond the former Soviet Union.
“Highly qualified Russian developers in the field of mathematics, physics and engineering have allowed our company to stay in first position in the Internet industry in Russia. Now we use these accumulated skills and experience to enter the global market,” stated Dmitry Grishin, co-founder and CEO of the Mail.Ru Group.
“Global expansion is important when thinking about the long-term success of the company,” he added in an exchange with US tech publication Venture Beat, which jokingly described the move as an “invasion of America.”
