iAppContest is the first competition in Eastern Europe between iPhone developers. The contest will be running in Ukraine for 2 months from April 16 to June 16. Results will be announced on a stage during the Final Event, on Saturday June 19th, Kiev, Ukraine.

We are expecting hundreds apps to be submitted to the Contest, 30 apps will be chosen out of categories, and then our USA-Ukrainian Jury will vote and pick the best three. Winners will be rewarded by a trip to the Silicon Valley where they will pitch, market their product, find partners, investors, and opportunities to grow. The uniqueness of the situation: iPhone is officially not available in Ukraine yet, but the development movement is big. For most Ukrainian developers experiencing the technological heart of the world, Silicon Valley, remains only a dream, with your support will can make it a reality.

The world’s famous social-networking site Facebook is in talks with Russian mobile operators and is opening up an office in Russia.

Facebook counts more than 400 million active users. Its main competitor, MySpace, already opened a Russian office but closed it in summer 2009 along with offices in a number of other countries. One of the main functions of MySpace’s Russian office was ad sales.

Facebook may also sell space on its site to Russian advertisers, Facebook may reach an agreement with mobile phone carriers. The mobile operators are discussing many different possibilities for cooperation. In particular, there is talk of integrating the social network with the operators, of paying for Facebook content via SMS and of a subsidized fee structure.

Facebook’s goal is to reach 15 percent to 20 percent of Russian Internet users, said an employee at another operator. According to TNS Web Index, there were 32.6 million Internet users in February. The social network could get about 4.9 million to 6.5 million users, said Denis Terekhov, a partner at consulting agency Sotsialniye Seti.

Source: The Moscow Times

Digital Sky Technologies wants to buy a share of the popular Russian startup Chatroulette.com. It’s what the German magazine Spegel reports. According to the magazine. DST claims about 10% of Chatroulette, and Ternovskiy evaluates the entire company at 10-30 million euros.

Chatroulette is a service that allows users to communicate online using video and text chat. The novelty of this service is that the source is chosen in random order and users communicate each other at the first time. Ternovskiy launched his website last November, and since then his audience has grown from 50 to 1.5 million people a day. The project is connected with seven servers in Germany and Ternovskiy received the first amount of money from his parents.

So far, Chatroulette has received many offers from various Venture funds, especially from the USA.

GameLand Network, a Russian companies which holds the rights for the Russian television channel Gameland TV, has sold a minority stake to the Japanese venture fund UMJ Russia Fund, as Pasha Romanovsky from Game Network told to Vedomosti. The amount of the investment was not disclosed but consultants near the transaction said it is around $ 3 million for the 30% of the company capital.

After this operation, the Russian channel will also distribute Japanese contents to the Russian audience. Mr. Otsubo, from UJM, reported his interest for the Russian game market and believes that Gameland TV is successful multimedia project, in a country where the Internet penetration is growing rapidly and the Japanese pop culture (video games, anime, manga and music) is very popular among Russian youngs.

Gameland TV was launched in February 2008 and its revenue was estimated in $ 1 million for the year 2009. UMJ Russia Fund was established by United Managers Japan Inc. in June 2007.

From 9 to 11 April in Moscow will be held the second Startup Weekend. Hundred of entrepreneurs are going to gather together for 2 days and try to start new business projects.

At event will take part around 100-150 experts and entrepreneurs like marketing managers, IT-specialists, vendors, designers, project managers and other bright personalites. They will select the most interesting business ideas and join the teams. During the Startup Weekend the young entrepreneurs have the real chance to personally meet with experts and gurus, and if lucky, eventually attract some of them into their projects. So the event gives the practical possibility to develop a business idea into the next development step.
The Moscow International Higher Business School “MIRBIS” will host the event.

Online game “Happy Farmer” as collected a record of $ 20 million during just one year from its launch in Russia.
This also means that the social networks are learning to how make money. Around half of the $ 20 million were brought by the social site VKontakte.

“Happy Farmer” was launched in April last year, through the social network “Vkontakte” and since then has brought about $ 20 million in revenue, as told by Alex Kostarev, founder of I-Jet, which has published the game. “Happy Farmer”, according to Kostarev, was developed by the Chinese company Elex. I-Jet has licensed the game in Russia.

“Happy Farmer” gives players the possibility to grow plants and animals in their own virtual farms. The game is for free, and users can also buy additional features from Vkontakte.ru (by sending a sms or using electronic money transfer systems). The $ 20 million are divided between the social networks, the publisher and the developer.

In 2010, the Russian market of games for social networks will reach about $ 100 million, as predicted by Mail.ru.

The Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, has recently announced that Russia will build a high-tech hub near Moscow as a step to modernise the economy and reduce its dependence on oil and gas. The project aims to give state backing to major companies to help them develop selected innovative products.

In the centre will be developed five priority sectors – energy, IT, telecommunications, bio-medical and atomic technologies – and will be built near Skolkovo, a town located just west of the Moscow Ring Road, and home to the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, a premier business school in Russia.

The Russian government seems quite focused on developing a strong technology industry in Russia and reduce the gap with the other developed countries. Also, for Russia is important to retain its scientists and develop global high tech corporates. Already last year the government also announced that by 2010 several technoparks will be build near Moscow, St.Petersbourg, Tumen, Nizhniy Novgorod, Kaluga, Novosibirsk and in Tatarstan. Some of those projects have been already launched, like technopark in Petergoff (St.Petersbourg region) and foreign investors such as Boeing are very interested in this project.

In Ukraine over the last year has increased the number of Internet users making online payments. The head of the Internet auction Kopeikoff.com, Artyom Yaremchuk, said that during the first months of the service in Ukraine, more than half of the payments were done via SMS. 20% were done though bank and only 25% were done online.

A year later, 70% of all the payments were done with the help of electronic systems like Portmone, Liqpay and Webmoney, and 20% through terminals. Payments via SMS have been dramatically reduced.
Kopeikoff’s managers explain that this trend is connected to two main factors. On one side, the Internet culture is rapidly growing in Ukraine and on the other side, the online shoppers are more confident on the online payment systems.

Today Kopeikoff is one of the most popular Scandinavian auctions in Ukraine. It was launched just a year ago.

Olga Sternik is the owner of Sterno.ru a Moscow based digital agency supporting marketing campaigns in the Internet. They just launched a new and interesting project – Brandspotter. So we went to ask more about this.

Olga, can you shortly describe your last project, Brandspotter?

Brandspotter is a B2B online service for monitoring and management of brand reputation in social media (right now – in Russian social media only). It is a system with two main features. First, it gets all the stats data from your (and your competitors’ if you wish so) communities and accounts in social networks and blog hostings. Your dashboard provides you all the picture of your brand’s activity in one place: how many fans (readers, followers) are subscribed to your groups, how active are they (do they read, comment, post, share). Second, Brandspotter listens all the Russian blogs, Russian part of Livejournal, Twitter and several others. It then finds all the mentions of your brand, products etc, makes emotional analysis and sypplies you with a feed of all posts mark-uped as positive/negative/neitral. As a cherry on a cake, it gives you many interesting statistical data one could mine from listening – for example, how many unique users mention you. Or which users mention you more than once, and how big is their audience.

What’s your main market target (in terms of type of clients) and why they should use your services?

Fashion brands, electronic and FMCG brands, retail chains, banks, mobile providers, i.e. all the consumer-oriented businesses. Any office in Russia where a marketing manager today is suffering a headache thinking about online reputation, about Social Media presence and about their ROI.

What’s the business model behind BrandSpotter?

Monthly subscription fee.

Do companies in Russia pay particular attention to their imagine and reputation on social media sites? And how do they see this new marketing tool?

Oh yes. The market for SM agencies seems to experience a rocket launch. Every company either has already established their presence or is making first tries. And we have received a great interest from many our potential clients even before we started the presentations.

Sergey Orlovsky and his company Nival Network have raised $ 5 million from DST and 1C. Other $ 2 million will be invested by Orlovsky himself. Nival Network, part of Nival Group, was founded by Sergey Orlovsky in 2009 and produces online games for social networks, and also creates its own social network for gamers.

Orlovsky is been involved in computer games since the mid 1990′s. With Nival Interactive he developed for the French Ubisoft the fifth version of the game Heroes of Might and Magic, which became a hit in the summer of 2006.

On the other side, it’s not the first time that DST invests in projects owned by Orlovsky: in 2006 DST invested $ 15 million for a controlling stake in developer Nival Online.