Drimmi, which comes from “dream me”, is a Russian social games developer founded by the end of 2009 and which recently has raised $ 4 million from two venture funds, Capital Partners and ABRT Fund.

The company goal is to get the leadership in the very promising Russian social games market and for that the Founder and CEO, Nikita Sherman, pointed out that a second round of investment will be necessary for the company in order to also enter other markets outside Russia.

The startup is based in Moscow and also had opened office for development in other two Russian cities. The first social game developed is called “Fish Place”, which evidentelly is about fishing and is available on the leading Russian social network, Vkontakte.

eBay will soon release a dedicated Russian version of its famous website in order to increase sales in Russia and take more Russian buyers. This decision is to be seen as part of eBay recent expansion in Europe.

During the last years more and more Russians have traded and especially bought on eBay, which is then already popular in the country. Nevertheless, several problems or limitations remain for eBay expansion in Russia. First of all the payment system and the use of Paypal in Russia with the restrictions to receive money back in case of fail of the transaction. It means also that the active eBay Russian users will be only the buyers and not the sellers since they can’t receive the payment.

Moreover, many Russian entrepreneurs have created a lot of auction websites during the last years based on the eBay model, so the competition for the US giant will be already in place.

It will be interesting to follow the eBay strategy in Russia during the next months and see if they will put in place something more than a simple Russian language website to take advantage over the local competition.

Once again we are here to write about DST, the Russian venture fund investing in Internet companies. And this time because the DST’s CEO, Yuri Milner, announced that the fund is ready to invest $ 1 billion in social web companies within the next 5 years. The Moscow based fund plans to invest in social mea startups around the world, mostly outside Russia to become a significant investor in the Internet arena, that’s what Milner told to Bloomber Businessweek.

In Russia DST has investments in Mail.ru and VKontake.ru, which is the leading Russian socialweb. Analysts say that companies like Twitter and Foursquare are potentially a target for the Russian fund, which already detains also a share in Facebook and currently is bidding for AOL’s ICQ.

Milner say he invests in a long term perspective, like Warren Buffett, an investor he admires.

Plugg is among the best conferences in Europe and this year will be held on the 11th March in Brussels. The conference aims to provide a clear picture of what is happening in the European digital industry. The panel of speakers is quite impressive and is composed by visionaries and industry experts. During the event there will also be the possibility for startups to showcase their ideas and businesses.

Here how they define the event:
Plugg is a one-day conference with a clear focus on celebrating entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and raising global awareness for those European start-ups in the Web / Mobile 2.0 field that stand out in the crop.

And we hope that we can really start to celebrate the European entrepreneurship as soon as possible…

Yandex has launched a new version of Yandex.Bar toolbar with integrated module allowing to detect the location of the user with the accuracy up to 150 meters. To implement this function and provide the same option in mobile version of Yandex.Maps, Yandex used the technology of AlterGeo company.

AlterGeo, earlier named Wi2Geo – a Russian Startup, developed a technology of hybrid positioning based on strength of Wi-Fi signals. The main advantage of this technology – it allows to determine the location of a person even in the zones where GPS signal is not available.

AlterGeo develops both its own internet projects and offers b2b solutions. With help of AlterGeo’s technology, web site developers can determine the users’ location by IP address, provide additional services based on geo location, and show advertising, regarding the location of users. This technology is already used by a number of Russian companies, including the largest blog platform Livejournal.com.

AlterGeo was founded in 2008. The same year it was financially backed by the Russian seed fund Addventure.to. In March 2009 Altergeo got a round B of investment from Kite Ventures.

The Finnish Technopolis has recently announced four new lease agreements for its new tech park in St. Petersburg. Three of these new clients are well known companies from Sweden and Germany.

Technopolis is the leading Europe’s largest science and technology park chains. The Group provides a wide range of services combining word-class premises with business and development services.

Technopolis some year ago started to invest into the construction of a new technopark in Pulkovo, an area located near the St. Petersburg airport. They aim to promote the internationalization of Russian companies, stimulate the high-tech industry development in Russia and attract Finnish, European and international companies to the Russian market and to provide them with a safe and familiar operating environment.

Traditionally, the cooperation between Finland and Russia had been quite solid and in the South Karelia zone the IT sector is well developed.

The Pulkovo center will be completed within the 2010.

The Russian investment company DST seems to hold talks with a South African company for a possible merger between two Polish companies. In particular, the Russian own the 75% of Nasza-Plaza.pl, a successful Polish social networking while the South Africans own the Internet messaging service Gadu Gadu. The merger would bring together over 30 million registered users, bringing great sinergies and oportunities in the advertising area of revenues and lowering costs.

By the way, both the investments companies at the moment decline any comment about the possible merger. But according to the Russian Kommersant, the South African company is currently conducting a due diligence of some social networking sites, including Odnoklassniki.ru of Russia and Polish Nasza-Plaza.pl.

No longer a start-up, i-Free was founded back in 2001 in St. Petersburg and today it is a leading company in developing and marketing mobile technology products. The company has operations not just in Russia but also in other markets. Specifically, the offices are located in India, Ukraine, Belorussia, Brazil, China and Kazakhstan, while the products are available in more than 80 countries. i-Free had been growing fastly during the last 5-6 years, winning several awards and forging partnership with important other companies.

i-Free provides innovative solutions to a wide spectrum of industries, from financial markets to mobile and electronic commerce, from FMCG business to mobile content services.

According to iConText, a Moscow based contextual advertising agency, during the 2009 the Russian market of contextual advertisement reached $302 million, which means a growth of 13% compared to the previous year. The Russian search engine Yandex leads the market with a 78% market share, followed by Begun with 11% and Google with a 10% share.

While Google grew up by 50%, Begun revenues dropped by 29% to 1.1 billion Rubles ($34 million). Possibly, this negative performance can be associated to the Rambler’s share of searches in Russia, which passed from 11% to 4% in just one year. Actually, Begun serves Rambler with its search contextual advertisements.

iConText predicts for the 2010 a growth of the market in 20-25% and that the Google’s AdWords will overcome the Begun market share.

We continue to review interesting Science & Tech Parks in Russia and Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Technology Park – TechnoPort is a science and business centre which provides environment and facilities to innovative companies. It is still under construction and definition and the plan is to open it officially in 2015.

The park is located just 6 km from the city center of the capitol Warsaw. The creation of the Warsaw Technology Park was initiated in 2005 by the capital authorities and the Ministry of Science and Information Technology and their goal is to stimulate the economic development and business environment in the region and favourite the transfer of technologies from the science field to the industry.

Once completed, the companies and entreprenuers will have access to the shared services like administration, social equipment, advisory and consulting support, but also using the technical infrastructure and modern laboratories.

The focus in on several sectors, from IT to nanotechnologies, from renewable energy to logistics.