It is only one month since Russia unexpectedly lifted its ban on messaging service Telegram. But the company’s vice president this week appeared alongside Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin — and proposed a crusade against US tech giants Apple and Google. Mishustin took part in a panel discussion with IT industry executives near the city …
Telegram and Russia seek rapprochement amid attack on Apple Read More
The Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF, or FRII in Russian) has announced that 52 Russian startups are going through a three-month summer batch of its acceleration program – a record number since the fund’s inception in 2013. Eighty percent of the startups of this summer batch develop B2B solutions, in particular in the fields of marketing …
Intento, a startup with Russian roots, has secured a $3 million seed round, reports CrunchBase. Konstantin Savenkov, CEO, started the Berkeley, California-based company in 2016 with Grigory Sapunov, a deep learning and artificial intelligence expert who had worked five years at Yandex. Initially, as reported by East-West Digital News, Intento positioned its solution as a new way to …
My.Games, the game unit of LSE-listed Mail.ru Group, has just published the ‘Portrait of a Russian Gamer 2019,’ a study about players passionate about mobile, desktop, or console games, with an assessment of the Russian gaming market for 2019. According to My.Games calculations, the volume of the Russian video game market in 2019 increased by 14% year-on-year …
Russian video game market grew to $1.9 billion in 2019 Read More
Businesses face hefty penalties for operating on the Crimean peninsula, following its annexation by Russia in 2014 — a move deemed illegal by much of the international community and which resulted in the U.S., EU and other western countries placing stringent sanctions on Russia and barring firms from being active or investing on the peninsula. …
The Artemy Lebedev design studio created a neural network capable of creating its own designer logos. The AI was being developed in strict secrecy by a team of computer wizards working in isolation. The artificial intelligence itself was only known to the rest of the design bureau as ‘Nikolay Ironov’ – a pretty ordinary Russian …
How a Russian AI ‘graphic designer’ fooled the world for an entire year Read More
Major changes took place in late June on the Russian e-commerce and e-payment scenes. Yandex, the Russian Internet major, and Sberbank, the state-controlled financial and technology giant, announced an agreement “to reorganize their two joint ventures” – Yandex.Market and Yandex.Money. In plain language, this is a divorce. Yandex is to own entirely the e-commerce platform …
While divorcing with Sberbank, Yandex raises $1 billion to finance e-commerce projects Read More
In what could put an end to a long saga, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced today that it “obtained court approval of settlements with Telegram and its subsidiary TON Issuer Inc.” “Without admitting or denying the allegations in the SEC’s complaint, the defendants consented to entry of a final judgment enjoining them from …
In a televised address to the nation Tuesday, Putin also announced big tax cuts for the IT sector, apparently a bid to “turn Russia into India” by using tax incentives to attract and retain tech entrepreneurs. Putin claimed that, even in the midst of a pandemic, it was clear how the Russian IT sector has …
Yesterday a court in Moscow upheld the house arrest of Baring Vostok founder Michael Calvey on fraud charges despite the revelation that he has a malignant tumor. The US businessman faces embezzlement charges that he says are being used to pressure him in a business dispute. A Moscow court had ruled last month to extend the house …
US investor Michael Calvey kept under house arrest despite cancer revelation Read More
Kaspersky researchers have uncovered a new technique for stealing users’ payment information on online shopping websites, dubbed web skimming. By registering for Google Analytics accounts and injecting these accounts’ tracking code into the websites’ source code, attackers can collect users’ credit card details. Web skimming is a popular practice used by attackers to steal users’ credit …
Kaspersky researchers found a new fraudulent technique that steals online payment details Read More
The Russian IT industry will experience a severe brain drain in the wake of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and ensuing economic crisis, unless the government introduces support measures for the sector, major local IT companies warn. In 2020 to 2021, 10,000 to 15,000 IT professionals could leave Russia as the overall economic downturned caused by …
