For the first time in the history of technology industry, a delegation of 20 leading partners from Silicon Valley based Venture Capital firms will visit Russia. Rusnano and AmBAR (American Business Association of Russian professionals) will arrange the visit and meeting in Moscow on May 25-27.

The trip wants to provide the delegates with an opportunity to learn about Russia, meet with Russian technology companies and leaders, explore the emerging scene of the Russian start-ups. Moreover, the US delegates will also have the chance to meet with key government officials, local investors and entrepreneurs.
The list of participating VC firms includes: Bessemer Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, Sofinnova Ventures, JK&B Capital, Emergence Capital, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Domain Associates, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (law firm), Asset Management Company, Alloy Ventures, EDVenture, Silicon Valley Bank, Greylock Partners, Accel Partners, Siguler Guff & Company, Index Ventures, US Venture Partners, Almaz Capital Partners, Draper, Fisher & Jurvetson, Wellington Partners, Charles River Ventures.

More information are available on www.vctriptorussia.com

Opera Software, the populuar Norwegian browser, is opening an office in Russia, according to what its director of sales and business development in Russia and the CIS, Mikhail Ilyin, reported.
Last year the Opera business in Russia grew significantly and the number of users strongly increased so they want to be closer to the market and partners.

According to Ilyin, one of the main business of Opera is the collaboration with mobile operators and develop browsers for mobile phones. In Russia the company cooperates with the telecom operator MTS and other large Internet portals. Just a month ago Opera announced that MTS will provide co-branded version of the Opea Mini browers for its subscribers.

Opera Mini is the most popular browser for mobile phones in Russia, with the highest market share.

The Russian venture capital firm Parta Group has completed a $10 million second round investment in the online video game developer Playnatic Entertainment. For Parta Group the total investment into the company at this time is $30 million.

Playnatic Entertainment is a young, dynamically growing company engaged in development, publication and localization of on-line games and web-projects. Playnatic Entertainment was founded in December 2008 by Parta Group and the core team includes professionals with extensive experience in successful projects in the game development area. The company portfolio includes CyberSport Online, Elements of War, KillSkill and Moscow 3000.

Andrey Ternovskiy, the young Moscow guy behind Chatroulette, has announced that he is going to visit the USA to meet with venture capital and private equity investors. The 17 year old Russian Internet prodige has already received an offer from Yuri Milner of Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russian leading social media investment company.

But Ternovskiy did not accept Milner’s offer immediately since he has received hundreds of emails from American venture capitalists as well as from Google and Skype. The rising Internet star is now applying for a US visa so that he can make the trip to America to meet with potential investors and partners in Silicon Valley.

Chatroulette currently has approximately 1.5 million daily visitors. The website allows random strangers to initiate video conversations using Flash player’s new peer-to-peer protocol. Either user may leave the chat at any time to initiate another random connection.

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.