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.

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.

Imagine you are planning your vacation or choosing a new PC. In that case, often you search for blogs, forums and e-shops in order to find the best offer. And more you surf the more questions will appear and there is no one who answers them except your friends or google search string.

Russian startup krible.ru has identified this problem and offers an interesting solution. Krible replaces standard banners and context advertisment with chat windows, like this one:

For example, if you are looking for web page about tours to Thailand, you can chat directly with the tour agent and ask questions you have about holidays in Thailand. Krible offers new possibilities for web-site owners to earn bucks, by selling leads instead of selling clicks and gives a new opportunities for salesmen to find clients. Forced sales with live chat windows are used widely, and for example with Rackspace you really cannot escape chat window, as it pops almost in the center of the page. Krible is quite different and offers not just a tool for your company websites but a new advertisement system. Will it success or fail depends on the conversation rate of such kind of ad. Anyway customers get answers they need, salesmen get costumers they look for. Everyone is happy.
 

Live chat window at Rackspace.com

Tired of writing sms, e-mail, blog post or any other notes with your mobile phone? Say Welcome! to Pliq.me. Pliq is new service that translates your voice into text. No need to use your fingers, just tell your phone what you need to write in Russian, English, American or German. Other languages are planned to coming soon. To start “speaking with your phone” you just need to download the application for it. The supported systems are Symbian, Windows Mobile and Iphone. Pliq has been launched, it is in “beta” and is working!

The entrepreneurs ambitious to create new Internet startups and the venture capitalists target to invest in online business in Russia has not been influenced by the crisis. It is easy to prove it – almost each month new Venture Fund opens and new events appear. Elba is a great example of it.

“Elba” is a conference of internet projects and investors that will be held in Moscow during 27-29 of November. It is organized by Aleksander Plushev, Anton Merkurov and Badri Cobechia. The main aim of conference is to connect people full of ideas with the venture capitalists pockets.

To attract the attention of startups, a new award, called Plyuschev Award is to be granted to the projects of the year. Prize nominations are Idea, A prospect, Usefulness , Implementation, Content, Users’ choice, Grand-Prix – the best project among all projects presented.

More info can be found at Elba’s official website.

Online Microsoft Project Viewer allows you to share MS project files online. This is a great tool for all the entrepreneurs and managers for checking plans, showing them anywhere to investors, chiefs, etc., without carrying flash drive or notebook. This simple service was created by Mike Butorin, russian startuper and already founder of Song.ly.

As for online business this project has two main problems:
1. the potential audience is very limited and not “cheap” to get. Mike needs a strong marketing campaign;
2. sharing MS project files has no viral effect comparing to services that provide online works with Microsoft products, like slideshows. People do like to share and spread slideshows, but they keep MS projects files in confidential.

If you want to share music with your blog readers you can use muzicons or any other flash music player, but what about music in twitter? The answer is song.ly, a russian startup founded my Mike Butorin.

At song.ly website you can search songs you need or put URL of MP3′s you like. After this you will get an URL, which is already shortened for Twitter. Tweet this URL and every one, who clicks on it, will be able to listen the music you have chosen in a compact flash player. Quick and easy! And that is not all – developers can use song.ly API to help people to share music via Twitter at other website too.

There are a number of other services that help to put music on Twitter, but for sure Song.ly is one of quickiest and comfortable with its “Tweet” button. Song.ly uses Tagoo.ru API to search music.

As described by the founders in section “about”, muzicons.com is about “Show your mood and emotions” and “Tell about your favorite music tracks”. That is true, because muzicon is a compact flash player with emoticons, that helps bloggers to describe their mood.

Example:

Muzicons.com is an interesting alternative to plain emoticon images, that are used by most of blog-platforms such as livejournal.com. In order to create muzicon you need to choose icons, search for songs you need or use URL to Mp3 files, choose colour and size of the player. The last step is to place embed-code to your blog.

Muzicons.com was founded in Russia on April 2008 by Philipp Gladkov and Vadim Belozerov. The project was translated into 8 languages and has got fans fromall over the world: Asia, Europe and North America. Currently it has more then 40,000 registered users and 700,000 views each day, widely spread at livejournal.com and blogger.com. The website has been covered by popular blogs such as Mashable.com, Wired.com, etc.

Millions of music fans make music search engines very attractive for developers. But, it is not a quite good idea to start music search engine in USA. Lots of large searches, like Seeqpod.com that was closed by RIAA even after several million dollars of investment.

Russian music search Tagoo.ru seems well positionated and is used by a lareg international audience. It is translated in three laguages English, Russian and German. Tagoo provides direct links to mp3′s, you just need to register yourself fastly, log in and find all song you need, create playlists, share them and so on.

Tagoo Api provides music search for any project, like Seeqpod.com did before was shut down.