According to recent news, Russian-backed firm NGI acquired a stake in French software vendorr Mandriva, which develops Linux-based open-source operating system. According to other news, state corporation Russian Technologies agreed to acquire a blocking minority stake in ALT Linux.

Sistema plans to acquire the remaining 49% stake in M2M Telematics in the next two to five years.

Founded in 2005, M2M Telematics provides transport monitoring, navigation and telematics services based on GLONASS and GPS technologies. The company holds 9% of the Russian telematics market valued at over 900 million Rubles in 2009.

Sistema‘s portfolio companies RTI Systems and Sitronics together own a 51% stake in Navigation Information Systems (NIS) that implements a public-private partnership project to create a national traffic accidents emergency response system under the ERA GLONASS brand.

In July 2010, the leading Russian telematics company Russian Navigation Technologies that develops and markets the AutoTracker system for transport monitoring was valued $54 million at IPO on MICEX Stock Exchange.

Founded in 2005, Russian Navigation Technologies (RNT) specializes in development, production and installation of GPS/GLONASS-based telematics system AutoTracker for transport monitoring and fleet management. Over 60,000 vehicles in Russia use AutoTracker, which is more than 20% out of 250,000 vehicles in Russia equiped with GPS/GLONASS transport monitoring devices.

RNT reported revenues of RUR 210 million (ca. $7 million), EBITDA of RUR 44 million and net income of RUR 36 million in 2009. RNT plans to increase its revenues to over RUR 1,900 million in 2014. The Russian telematics market is expected to grow from RUR 900 million in 2009 to RUR 5,800 million in 2014.

In September 2008, VTB Venture Capital invested RUR 170 million (ca. $5.7 million) in Russian Navigation Technologies. After IPO, VTB will own 30.7% stake in RNT. Boris Satovskiy, CEO of RNT will own 26.6% stake in the company.

The IPO of Russian Navigation Technologies (AutoTracker) should be the first venture capital-backed IPO of the Russian technology company on the Russian stock exchange. The IPO’s managed by Otkritie and co-managed by Finam and ALOR Invest.

Exalead

Both 10-years old Exalead and Dassault are headquartred in France.

In other recent news, Clusty, a meta-search online service of search clustering engine vendor Vivisimo, was acquired for US$ 5.5 million by Yippy.

With over 100 million iOS (iPhone Operating System) devices being used around the world, Quintura that will shorlty release visual-based search applications for both iPhone and iPad has a strong chance to take part in search market consolidation.

The  monthly site search service subscription fee depends on a number of pages in site index, level of site search customization and technical support. We offer a special promotion until the end of summer 2010.

For “Premium Search” service, Quintura offers API service, for the first time. The web master can get site search results as XML feed and then use it directly from the programming code. In this case, it’s not necessary to embed the search widget.

VTB Capital

Founded in 1993, EPAM has 90% of its 5,400+ staff located in software development centers in Belarus and Russia. The company reported revenues of $160 million in 2008.

EPAM, which is headquartered in the U.S., is run by its founding CEO Arkadiy Dobkin. EPAM’s largest shareholder is private equity firm, Russia Partners that is managed by Drew J. Guff.

EPAM previously raised $50 million from Renaissance Investment Management, Da Vinci Capital and Euroventures in May 2008 and $25 million from Russia Partners’ Siguler Guff in January 2006.

Based on user feedback from more than 7,000 service registrations over the past two years, we improved web-site crawling and indexing, added new search display options and improved service user interface.

Being one of the major visual search engines, Quintura indexes a web-site and builds a search cloud of keywords and phrases related to the site.

The cloud is displayed as graphical user interface for searching and can be embedded to the site as a search widget.

See the widget in the left sidebar and create one at http://affiliates.quintura.com

One new option is that a publisher of several web-sites can create and manage site search for all its web-sites using single user account.

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.