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

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.

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.

Next Friday, 12th of March, in Moscow will be held the first Start-up Crash Test. The event will be host by the Moscow Business School, which is quite involved to promote the Russian startup scene. This is the first of a monthly events which aim to promote and develop entrepreneurship and “stress testing” web-related startups’ market strategy, business model, distribution, etc.

A good panel of experts is invited and will take part in the discussion. People from Cisco Systems, Begun and others will evaluate 3 crash test projects. The program will be long around 4 hours and many topics will be discussed, like technolgy, marketing and business models behind the startups.

The startup crash test is quite popular in Ukraine were was invented. Last the first event like that in Russia was organized in Saint Petersburg.

Everybody knows that Twitter is the most successful microblog in the world with its 75 million users. By the way, the famous social web has so far a small audience in Russia with just 183,000 Russian accounts, according to a Yandex research.

Russians spent a lot of time on-line and using social sites. Actually, the number of Russian daily twitters is much higher than the average, 60% against just 20%, according to RJMetrics. Around 150,000 new messages are wrote by Russian twitters everyday.

The real interest of Russians to use Twitter started by the end of 2009. In fact, during the winter time across 2009 and 2010 the number of Russian speaking users grown by 42%.

A recent Russian start-up successfully launch is ivi.ru. The portal contains more than 9000 hours of video, including movies and TV series, absolutely free and legally to view. The new company has a business model based on advertisement and has already signed agreements with more than 100 copyrights holders like Amedia, Muz-TV and Central Partnership. Internet users will have to watch advertisements included in the videos in exchange to have the possitibility to watch for free. The income will be shared by website owners and copyright holders. From the site it’s also possible to watch 2 Russian TV channels like MTV and TNT in streaming.

One of the ivi.ru owner is Digital Access Holding and the the total investment in the new business is estimated in several million dollars. ivi.ru can be considered the Russian version of Hulu.com, the US video hosting founded in 2007.

Tieto Corporation, which is certainly not a start-up, has just acquired T&T Telecom, a Russian IT and consultancy company based in St. Petersburg and Moscow and serving the telecom operators. The Finnish giant is continuing to expand its operations in Russia, where has already more than 250 employees. Basically, the company helps its telecom clients to increase their productivity and introduce new innovation services.

T&T Telecom CEO, Yuri Pesnya welcomes the new owner, knowing the benefits his company will get. The Russian company will become part of a leading international group and acquire new competencies to serve its base of clients with more services. The company’s customer base includes Megafon, Vimpelcom, Svyazinvest, Delta Telecom, Comstar, Sinterra and Rostelecom.

Will be held in Moscow next week the third conference “Social networks, blogosphere and Internet community” i-community 2010, organized by the Regional Public Center of Internet and Technologies (ROCIT).

This would be a good opportunity for Russian bloggers and Internet companies to analyse the state of art of social networks in Russia and impact of Twitter in Russian web. No doubts that Russians spend a lot of time on-line and especially using social websites to stay in contacts and share information.

The program of the conference is quite rich and will offer the opportunity to discuss topics regarding the social networking, how socialwebs can monetize their business and the legal issues behind it, the micro-blogging and in general the future of the blogosphere.

Moreover, during the conference will be announced the winners of the blog contest BlogRuNet in the next nominations:

Community blog
Business blog
Corporate blog
Personal Blog
News blog
Micro Blog
Photo blog

Mail.ru has just released the acquiring of Sergey Orlovsky shares in Astrum Nival. It means that now the company owns the 100% of the online games developer, which will work under the brand Mail.ru. Astrum Nival owns the rights to market and publish in Russia many famous and popular projects like Perfect World, ZT Online, Jade Dynasty, «Granado Espada: Scions of Fate” and “Pirates”.

Dmitry Grishin, Mail.ru CEO, commented this acquisition as an opportunity for Astrum Nival to improve its efficiency and the possibility for Mail.ru to strenghten its position in the strategic online games market in Russia. As we reported, last December Mail.ru aquired AOE, a leading online-games developer in Eastern Europe, having the goal position the company has leader in the online entertainment and online games.