Tieto plans to invest EUR 100 million in expanding its IT service business in Russia via both acquisitions of local IT service companies, opening own data center and R&D facilities in 2010-11, the newspaper reported.

Founded in 2002, Telecom Design completed 400 integrated telecom projects for fixed-line and mobile telecom operators, banks, outsorcing call centers and state companies. The company employs over 70 telecom consultants in offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Its major customers include Megafon, Vimpelcom, Svyazinvest, Delta Telecom, Comstar, Sinterra and Rostelecom.

Nginx serves over 15 million web-sites. It is being used by leading Russian portal Rambler.ru, as frontend IMAP/POP proxy by FastMail and load balancer by WordPress, among others.

The http, reverse proxy and mail proxy server software nginx [engine x] is free and open source. Nginx was written by one person, the Russian software developer Igor Sysoev. He is the only developer of nginx, according to his interview to Pingdom.

Igor Sysoev was born and grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He graduated from the Bauman State Technical University in Moscow in 1994. Igor Sysoev works at Rambler Media (the owner of Rambler.ru) as senior system administrator.

Founded in 1999, Parallels has numerous sales and business offices across the U.S., Europe and Asia and significant research and development operations in Russia. The annual revenues of Parallels exceed $100 million. The company, which has more than 700 employees, is led by CEO Serguei Beloussov.

In 2005, Parallels (formerly SWsoft) raised its first institutional round of funding from Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Insight Venture Partners. In 2009, Almaz Capital part acquired Insight’s share in Parallels.

In 2006, Siguler Guff & Company invested in EPAM Systems, global leader in software engineering services with offices in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Hungary. Russia Partners‘ latest fund, Russia Partners III with comitted capital of $626 million was raised in 2008.

Today, we released a new SEO tool – Quintura SEOInfo for keyword extraction and more that demonstrates the Quintura technologies.

You can use the SEOInfo tool to extract keywords, build annotation and derive categories for an internet article or any text.

Simply, type in URL of the article and press “Process” button on SEOInfo. You can adjust a size of annotation and number of categories.

Gerard Lopez, Managing Partner at Mangrove Capital Partners, is also director at Genii Capital of Luxembourg. In December 2009, Genii agreed to acquire a majority stake in Renault F1 Team.

Renault F1 Team just signed Russian driver Vitaly Petrov, the first Russian to compete in Formula One. Today, Vitaly Petrov made his debut for the team at winter car testing in Valencia. “This driver has the talent and we think that at some time that will help open up an interesting market. That’s someting that also appeals,” said Gerard Lopez about Vitaly Petrov to AP.

Mangrove Capital Managing Partner, Mark Tluszcz, Forbes Midas List #30 who’s speaking at Troika Russia forum in the Russian capital Moscow this week, twitted from there that “Russia is the largest Internet market in Europe – how can you not want to invest in this great country?” and “Entrepreneurs in this country are hungry“.

“Russia has proven to be a fast growing and dynamic market for social networks and gaming characterized by high levels of users engagement and strong monetization history. Mangrove [is] being in love with Russia”, said David Waroquier, Principal at Mangrove Capital Partners who leads the firm’s investments in Russian market. 

Mangrove Capital has invested in four Internet and technology ventures from Russia such as social games company Drimmi, online shopping club KupiVIP.ru, in-game advertising company Entermedia and visual search engine Quintura. The venture capital firm intends to make several investments per year in the country.

Drimmi just launched its first social game. KupiVIP.ru raised $20 million, the largest Internet venture capital round in Russia. Entermedia owns one of the most compelling technologies for in-game advertising. Quintura was awarded its 8th U.S. patent; licenses its search technology to online information providers.

The contextual advertising accounted for 86% of Yandex revenues. The display (banner) advertising accounted for 11% of its annual revenues. The remaining 3% of revenues came from Yandex.Money, software sales, and others. The number of Yandex advertisers was up 55% year-on-year to 120,000. Yandex holds 78% share of Russian contextual advertising market valued at $9.6 billion Rubles ($302 million) in 2009.

According to TNS Russia, Yandex increased monthly audience 29% year-on-year to 22.7 million users. Yandex is the 7th largest search property globally with 1.9 billion searches in December 2009.

The leading online display advertisers in Russia included Ford Motor, Honda, MTS, Megafon, and Peugeot Citroen.

Acumatica, which launched its brand and web-site in October 2008, is incorporated in the US and has software development operations in Russia. The Acumatica technology was initially developed as a project of virtualization and automation software vendor Parallels. Serguei Beloussov, venture partner at Almaz Capital and CEO of Parallels, owns a stake in Acumatica, he told to the newspaper.

Almaz Capital Russia Fund I was formed in July 2008, when it completed an initial closing with a $30 million anchor investment from Cisco.

UnitLine provides WiMAX services to corporate customers in ten regions of Russia. Its annual revenues are estimated at about $3 million.

Founded in 2004, Trivon raised funding from Virgin Group of Richard Branson in 2008. The company offers wireless broadband internet access services to residential and SME customers in 36 regions of Russia. The Russian wireless broadband market was valued at $200 million in 2008.

ERP and mutimedia software vendor 1C Company, which is controlled by founder and CEO Boris Nuraliev, generated revenues of $450 million and income of $55 million in 2008.

BVCP raised Baring Vostok Private Equity Fund IV with total committed capital of $1.05 billion in February 2007. This was the largest private equity fund in Central and Eastern Europe at the time. The funds under management of BVCP paid cumulative dividends of $1,232 million in 1998 – 2007.

BVCP says that 27% of capital invested by Baring Vostok funds has been into telecommunication, media and technology sectors. BVCP is a major investor in search engine Yandex, online store Ozon.ru, IT services provider for financial institutions CFT, financial risk management software vendor Riskdata, WiMax telecom operator Enforta, wireless broadband equipment vendor Infinet Wireless, and the others.

Launched in April 2008, UAProm has 20 thousand daily users on its e-commerce sites in Ukraine (UAProm.net), Russia (RUProm.net), Belarus (BELProm.net) and Kazakhstan (KAZProm.net). UAProm has 40,000 registered companies on its database. More than 100 companies are paying customers.

MIH Allegro Group, which is owned by media group Naspers of South Africa, operates the leading e-commerce trading platforms and classifieds sites in Eastern Europe under the Allegro, Aukro and other brands. Naspers owns 43 percent of the leading Russian online portal, Mail.ru.

The Forum, which is organized by Incisive Media, will feature keynotes from top executives at Thomson Reuters, Telegraph Media Group, The Economist Group, Reed Business, etc. Quintura is one of the platinum sponsors of the Forum together with search engine Exalead and Mondeca.

The presentation will focus on using Quintura Site Search by online publishers to drive engagement with site visitors in order to increase content consumption and Click-Through-Rate.

To sign up as a delegate of the Forum at a discount rate, please quote the Quintura name at the time of booking and receive 10% off the full package rate. Please contact Joanna Letts either by email (joanna.letts@incisivemedia.com) or call her at +44 (0) 207 316 9361.