New Year is coming again and we are here to write just few lines of thanksgiving. We started eeStartup just few months ago with an important goal: promote the entrepreneurship in Russia and other Eastern European countries and let our companies to get more visibility abroad. During that period we have learnt a lot and discovered that the region has a great potential for growth. So, our commitment is to improve our activity quickly and provide quality news.

We would like to thank each of you for reading our stories, re-tweeting them and pay attention to a system which aims to create a better entrepreneurship emvironment. That’s has been very important for us and will be even more during the 2010!

The eeStartup team

Like in many other countries and areas, also in Poland you can find social websites. The most popular is Nasza-klasa.pl a social networking service which aims to bring together school’s students and alumni. In fact, Nasza klaza just means “our class”. The concept is similar to the American Classmate allowing its users to register from particular schools and graduation years. As common, the users create and maintain a personal page adding information such as their name, age, photos, interests and the history of schools and classes attended. To become a member of Nasza-klasa and browse the service a registration is required. The project is lead by Maciej Popowicz and it’s based in Wrocław.

Nasza-klaza.pl was initially launched in the late 2006 and so far has got more than 27 million registered users, which is an outstanding number. The service is owned by Forticom (www.forticom.lt) a Lithuanian based company which invests and keeps shares in several social networks like the popular Russian odnoklassniki.ru.

Google seems to take seriously into the Russian Internet market. The world number one search engine has recently closed a deal with Mail.ru to replace Yandex as its search engine. The contract between Google and Mail.ru will start from January 2010. By the way, the Google logo will not appear on the on the Mail.ru portal.

Google will also be powering the contextual advertising part for Mail.ru, in a country where the market is worth around $400 million.

The deal will see Google increase its Russian search market share by 60 percent. Mail.ru has a 10 percent share of the Russian search market, followed by Google on 23 percent and Yandex at 58 percent, according to stats from Liveinternet.ru.

Google and Mail.ru already partnered together for search during the period 2003-2005.

The search engine war in Russian has just started!

DST (Digital Sky Technologies) is a Russian investment fund quite active in the Internet and tech businesses. DST mostly invests on proven Internet business models that have the potential to shape the industry, including social networking and communications, e-payment solutions, online marketplaces, MMO and social games and vertical specific websites. With offices in Moscow and London they have direct investments in big international and Russian Internet players like Facebook, Mail.ru, Zynga and VKontakte.

DST has recently been very active in investing or M&A operations. One of the most important is the merger between Mail.Ru and AOE to create a Russian Internet giant. Within this operation DST merged its stakes detained in the two companies. And, of course, another important investment made by DST is the one in Zynga, developer of social online games based in San Francisco. This is the last investment was announced by DST few days ago.

Cheap-and-daily.ru was lauched on the 15th of December by the Russian entrepreneur Elena Masolova. This web-shop offers each day one item at the lowest price possible in limited quantities. The new item is published at 10 o’clock Moscow time, everyday. To enter the circuit the buyers can use RSS-feed, twitter or subscribe via e-mail. Vkontakte application and SMS notification are already planned.

The idea of Cheap-and-daily.ru came from Woot.com, lauched in 2007 and according to Fortune Magazine has 117 million dollar turnover with a margin of about 10-15% and 1,5 million visitors per month. The Masolova’s model is quite clear but even the most successful ideas sometimes fail due to features of the local Russian market. C&D fits the love of Russian buyers for large discounts and is positioned to suceed.

Elena Masolova said that they already have reached agreements with large Internet projects, such as Rasprodaga, Wikimart, Skillopedia and work on connecting new partners with more than 3000 visitors per day to protect their idea from copying and get enough buyers.

The more buyers C&D gets, the better offer they can make to wholesalers and as a result – lowest price of item will be offered to the final buyers.

Taras Paschenko is a Russian guy decided that he got tired from ordinary weather forecasts availble on dozens of websites. The problem for him was clear – numbers do not tell us anything and you can even get confused when try to understand how the real temperature is outside. To solve this “problem” Taras an created an original weather website where he added famous people: President Obama, actors Ashton, Angelina, Bruce Lee and even House and Bender.

According to Taras idea, the weather forecast looks more “cool” and more “human” – you can understand the clothes you should wear in relation to the outside temperature. The interface is clear and simple. Android and iPhone applications will help you to watch weather, while you are away from the PC.

Obama-weather.com got a great start and was covered by “The Wall Street Journal”, “NBC Chicago”, “The L magazine”, “The Gazette”, “Рамблер”, “Известия” and other local press. The Project was also showed on Chinese, German and Belorussian TV’s. The peak of more than 60.000 users per day was hardly managed by the servers at the beninning but after some technical modification now everything works stable.

RUSNANO (Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies) is a public company founded by the Russian Government in the 2007 and aims to invest and develop projects in the field of Nanotechnology.

On 11th of december RUSNANO announced the approval of a project aimed at production of nano-heterostructure photoconverters with the efficiency reaching 37-45%. The goal is to commercialize the outcomes of research conducted in the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute for constructing the main blocks of concentrator solar photovoltaic plants.

RUSNANO, Module Solar AG and “Solnechniy Potok” (Solar flux) company, established by the key developers of technology, are taking part in the project company chartered capital. R The total budget of the project is estimated as 5730 mln rubles, which means roughly 130 mln EUR.

The evidence is that sooner or later even Russia, like the other strong emerging markets, will invest massively in the cleantech and environment field.

The Budapest based Joobili is a start up which helps travellers to arrange their trips considering their time before the destination. With Joobili, you say when and it says where you can find the best travel experiences specific to your travel dates and personal interests.

Thanks to an easy and interactive interface it is possible to choose the period when you wish to travel and discover all the events planned for that time and for city. And of course the event planners and promoters have the chance to get themselves more visible.

Yota was founded in the 2008 and is a service developed and retained by WIMAX Holding.

Yota represents the first Russian high-speed wireless network based on Mobile WiMAX. It was founded in the 2008 by WIMAX Holding which develops and retains the Yota services. The WiMAX is delivered up to 10 Mbps within the covered area and this connection can be maintained even when moving at high speed.

Yota offers unlimited traffic plan, you just need to choose which plan is more convenient for you and pay a fix monthly fee. The services include the Internet connection, TV, music, video and social networks.

They are promoting the Yota services aggressively around the city of Moscow through a campaign which covers different communication means. Right now Yota is available in 5 Russian cities – Moscow, Saint Petersburg. Ufa, Krasnodar and Sochi.

3Dbin is a russian based startup that offers to all web-shops and Ebay traders a new way to improve the visual looking and presentation of the listed items using 3D images.

3dbin.com doesn’t sell any expensive equipment to make 3D photos, it just provides a great service to create pseudo 3D images. All you need is to take a several photos of any object: shoes, bag, car or even person from different angles and upload them to 3Dbin. The result will be an interactive flash player, where you can “spin” an object.

Several examples.