The list includes startup internet companies from Russia, which launched new online services and raised venture capital funding in 2009. The below startups were involved in major Russian venture capital deals in 2009.

1. The leading Russian online shopping club, KupiVIP.ru has reached over 1 million registered users since launch in late 2008. Founded by CEO Oskar Hartmann, the Moscow-based company raised a new funding of over $10 million from Mangrove Capital Partners, ABRT Fund, Arlan and Direct Group in 2009.

2. The major independent women-centric online portal in Russia, WomanJournal.ru has recently re-launched the site. Founded by French Direct Group in late 2006, WomanJournal.ru agreed to merge with Passion.ru in November 2009 to create the online market leader for Russian women with over 5 million monthly users.

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3. The electronic note application service, Evernote has reached 2 million users by launching versions for all major mobile and computer desktop platforms. Founded by Stepan Pachikov in 2006, Evernote raised a new funding of $12 million from Morgenthaler Ventures and DOCOMO Capital in 2009 to expedite growth by releasing local language versions and expanding software OS platforms.

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4. On-demand online movie service, VidiMAX is expected to launch in spring 2010. The company raised more than $4 million from Troika Venture Fund ahead of the launch.

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5. Founded in the middle of 2008, Russia’s first online shopping mall, WikiMart boasts high-profile business angel investors. The company, which raised several hundred thousand dollars from Western investors in May 2009, faces a challenge to grow regular traffic to the site above current 5 thousand daily visitors.

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6. 3D web-enabled social gaming developer, CloudMatch renders the 3D world in a cloud and delivers 3D graphics to Web browsers using AJAX. Founded by Max Gannutin and Andrey Kazakov in 2009, Mountain View, CA and St. Petersburg, Russia-based CloudMatch offers 3D postcards Facebook application CloudCards and develops 3D chat/virtual room application CloudChat. The company is also involved in co-production of social games with game publishers. CloudMatch is looking for its first major venture capital funding.

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7. Personal computer security software vendor, SafenSoft delivers new standards of protection against computer viruses, trojans, exploits and hackers. Founded in 2006 by CEO Mikhail Kalinichenko as spin-off of StarForce, SafenSoft raised $3.6 million from Troika Venture Fund in March 2009 and entered the U.S. market with SafenSec products in November 2009.

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8. Virtual computing company iCore Software has launched beta version of iCore Virtual Accounts (VA), container-based virtualization for Windows desktop, for free download. iCore VA are isolated virtual machines that run on top of existing hardware and operating system. Founded in 2007 by Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology PhD students Artem Prokopenko and Nikita Parfenov, iCore Software raised seed funding from ABRT Fund.

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9. Create-your-own-avatar (“inf”) service “А-я-яй.ру” (iii.ru) was launched in March 2009 by online expert systems and virtual assistant service developer Nanosemantics. In June 2009, iii.ru reached 100,000 registered users. The avatar can be trained and embedded into your own site or blog. The company is funded by Natalya Kaspersky, CEO of InfoWatch and her husband Igor Ashmanov.

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10. WiFi-based geolocation service provider Wi2Geo (Wireless to Geographic) offers its online and mobile users a range of location-based services from its online partners. Launched in Moscow in July 2008, Wi2Geo has raised funding from Kite Ventures of Edward Shenderovich.

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ICQ has over 42 million active users wordwide and is available in 16 languages.

Naspers/MIH Group has over 450 million instant messaging users in its fully- and partially-owned portfolio companies around the world including:

- 410 million registered users of QQ (35%-owned by Naspers) in China in March 2009;

- 15 million registered users of Gadu-Gadu (acquired and 100%-owned by Naspers from 2007) in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Ukraine;

- 10 million registered users of Agent@Mail.ru (43%-owned by Naspers) in Russia;

- 10 million registered users of mobile IM service MXit (30%-owned by Naspers) in South Africa and Indonesia;

- 10 million registered users of Netherlands-based mobile IM service Nimbuzz (38%-owned by Naspers); and

- several million users of mobile messaging services of ACL Wireless (30%-owned by Naspers) in India and South-East Asia.

]]> http://blog.quintura.com/2009/11/19/acquisition-of-icq-to-make-naspers-as-big-as-skype/feed/ 0 http://blog.quintura.com/2009/09/04/google-seeks-to-move-to-meaning-based-search-quintura-does-it/ http://blog.quintura.com/2009/09/04/google-seeks-to-move-to-meaning-based-search-quintura-does-it/#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:58:06 +0000 Quintura http://blog.quintura.com/?p=3137 Google CEO, Erick Schmidt has revealed in his recent interview to Techcrunch that Google needs to move from words to meaning, i.e. better understand search queries and return results based on meaning of the query.

“We have to get from the sort of casual use of asking, querying…to “what did you mean?””, he told to TechCrunch.

The search technology that powers Quintura visual-based search services such as Quintura Site Search and Quintura for Kids operates like a human brain. Quintura, whose index features a search cloud of related terms to easily refine searching, returns search results based on meaning and not keywords. Its search index is based on contextual relationships among search terms.

Quintura has been awarded five U.S. patents for its neural networking search technology and graphical search interface. –The patents validate neural networks for search, visualization and context management, contextual accuracy and relevance of search results, and use of neural networks for keyword generation.

That is why some major providers of online information has expressed serious interest in licensing the Quintura technology for meaning-based search and navigation.

See also Quintura’s Search Cloud vs. Google’s Wonder Wheel.

PCWorld.com

Here is an explanation why Rick turned to Quintura:

“Because I can’t monitor my kids’ computer activity every second of the day, I’m starting by replacing Google with Quintura. This kid-friendly search engine lets you type in a query and/or click your way through a word cloud and get G-rated results in return.”

Since 2007, the teachers and librarians of more than 1,000 elementary schools in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand have been using Quintura for Kids, a kids-friendly search engine developed and operated by Quintura.

Here are screen shots of search for “Apple + iPhone” on Quintura.com and Google.com.

To join the conversation, go to the Twitter search for “Quintura” or leave your comments here on this blog.

Will this be the end of the visual search engines or just the beginning?

• New Mini-Cloud Settings – settings for search results display,
• Banners – an interface to enable embedding images within search clouds.

New Mini-Cloud Settings

Display search results under the Quintura search widget. If this parameter is disabled, the widget will have no search results displayed and users will go directly to the full-size Quintura search cloud on a separate site page by clicking a word in the widget’s search cloud.

If a mini-cloud has search results displayed, the other parameters shall be set to open the full-size search cloud by Clicking a word or Clicking a result. On the full-size search cloud the selected search result will have a detailed annotation.

Banners

In tests, the favicons and banners that are embedded in the Quintura search clouds attract user interest to site search and have a higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR). The Quintura affiliates that embed its site search now have the option to associate images (banners) with search terms.

This feature enables web publishers to accompany a search query with a favicon, which, when mouse-overed, will expand into a banner (see an example on http://affiliates.quintura.com/). The banners can also be displayed as the first result on a separate search engine results page. The favicons and banners are added in the Banners section of the administration page at affiliate publisher’s online account.

To try new features, embed Quintura Site Search for your site via http://affiliates.quintura.com

We wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

ONEXIM Group, which is led by Mikhail Prokhorov, is one of Russia’s largest private investment funds with a focus on mining industry, innovative projects in energy and nanotechnology, real estate and other industries. ONEXIM has more than $25 billion in funds under management.

In Russia, the Forbes magazine is published by Axel Springer Russia. The magazine web-sites Russian Newsweek and ComputerBild that are published by Axel Springer use the visual-based site search from Quintura.

ONEXIM Group has recently financed the launch of the Snob magazine in Russia. Next, coming are the Snob TV and muti-media online portal on Snob.ru.

In September 2008, ONEXIM Group acquired 50% of Renaissance Capital, the leading investment bank in the Russian, CIS and African markets for $500 million. The bank advised the shareholders of Mail.ru on a sale of 30% stake to media and Internet group Naspers.

Rambler Media

Rambler Media, which owns 50.1% of Begun, agreed to sell the company to Google for $140 million last July.

Google had 5% share of $210 million Russian contextual ad spending in 2007. Begun had 20% and Yandex had 64% share of online ad spending, respectively, according to iConText. Technically, Google and Begun together will hold less than 30% market share. However, if Google had acquired Begun, there would have been only two major contextual advertising companies left in Russia – Yandex and Google. That would have been a duopoly.

According to Wikipedia, duopoly is “specific type of oligopoly where only two producers exist in one market. In reality, this definition is generally used where only two firms have dominant control over a market”. In fact, a duopoly usually leaves a limited room for competition and product innovation.

With three major contextual ad services on the Russian internet market, web publishers will have a much greater choice of selecting one that best suits their needs.

The news has been first picked up by paidContent.org

The advertising campaign, which’s valued at $5 million for October – November 2008, is the largest ever in the Russian internet history, according to computer news site Compulenta. For example, the recent ad campaign by Google was smaller by an order of magnitude. Rambler first announced its new vision of creating “Russia’s leading open gateway to the Web and becoming Russia’s favorite homepage” last February.

Rambler launched a new homepage last week. The homepage offers a more clean and streamlined design and includes integration of Netivibes and other external services.

The Russian internet gossip site Roem.ru has captured a Rambler billboard on the streets of Moscow (see it to the left) and posted it, ironically, on Yandex.Fotki, a photo sharing site of Rambler‘s competitor, Yandex. The ad, which was put together by BBDO, could be translated as “How does your day begin? All the very new today… Rambler, drive of of your day.”

Rambler Media recently reported its revenues were up 152 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2008. It also launched a movie download service and sponsored the Russian Football Cup to drive usage of its services.

Update: Yahoo! has launched an ad campaign to attract users to its search engine. To compare Yahoo!’s costs of acquiring a new user with Rambler’s ones, it will be good to know how much Yahoo! is investing into its campaign.

In July 2008, Rambler agreed to sell a 50.1% stake in contextual ad firm Begun to Google for $70.1 million. In addition, the company agreed to enhance searches made on Rambler by Google and display Google ads alongside its natural search results. According to business newspaper Vedomosti, Rambler will release new design of its homepage that will include Google search in October 2008. Rambler will also add services from other online content providers to its homepage.

User statistics:

• 37.3 million average monthly unique users in 1H 2008, up 30% from 1H 2007.
• 2.7 billion average monthly page-views, up 17%
• 1.7 billion searches in 1H 2008 or 283 million average monthly searches, up 21%.

Financial highlights:

• Total revenues of $51.7 million in 1H 2008, up 152% from 1H 2007, including:
  • like-for-like revenues of $35.4 million, up 73%,
    • paid search – $6.9 million, up 60%,
      
    • display ads – $21.7 million, up 94%,
      
    • others – $6.8 million.
  • revenues from Begun’s partner network of $16.3 million.
• EBITDA of $8.9 million with EBITDA margin of 17%.
• Operating loss of $1.5 million.
• Cash balance of $26.1 million at June 30, 2008 (excluding Begun).
  

Key deals and events:

• Acquired remaining 49% stake in comparison shopping search engine Price.ru for $4.0 million in July 2008.
• Sold 51% stake in online display ad agency Index20 to IMHO VI (Video International Group) for $145 thousand in April 2008.
• Signed new partnership deals with ICQ for instant messaging, blinkx for video search, and IMHO VI for selling display ads.
• Named title sponsor of the Russian Football Cup in April 2008.
  

The Vedomosti newspaper has found out that Rambler aims to reach 10 million daily users, up from 2.7 million in July 2008.

I would like to announce today that Quintura has received several million dollars in bridge funding from leading European early-stage venture capital investor Mangrove Capital Partners as a part of new financing round.

The funding will help to scale the site search platform and grow monthly audience of Quintura Site Search from its current 8 million to 50 million in 2009 as well as helping to bring in new venture capital investors.

I would like to introduce Dennis Szerszen who joins Quintura as Chief Marketing Officer, based in the U.S. Dennis has over twenty five years of experience in the enterprise software and technology industry. He was previously Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development at security software vendor SecureWave (now Lumension Security). His career also includes time as an IT industry analyst, and as a program executive at IBM.

Quintura currently powers site search for popular lifestyle sites including Maxim.com, Passion.ru and Cosmo.ru; technology news sites ReadWriteWeb and Compulenta, business community portal E-xecutive.ru; web-sites of consumer magazines Hilary Magazine, Russian Newsweek, ComputerBild, luxury site LeLuxe.ru, in addition to hundreds of smaller web-sites and blogs that joined the Quintura affiliate program for site search by registering on the Quintura affiliate portal.

By utilizing Quintura Site Search, web publishers and content owners can increase usage of in-site search by several times resulting in additional page-views and time spent on site. Web publishers will soon have an option to monetize Quintura Site Search with graphical search ads which will be released with several other major enhancements this Fall.

In-house tests of Quintura Site Search are underway on various US sites, including two major men’s lifestyle sites and an educational web publisher.

A screenshot of Quintura Site Search widget on AltSearchEngines.com is shown below. A contextual search advertisement of Quintura for Kids is displayed in the widget’s search cloud for the search term “search” as an example for how Quintura Site Search can be customized.