In December 2009, Russian online portal, Mail.ru merged with online games company Astrum Online Entertainment. In February 2010, Mail.ru acquired the remaining 30% stake in online game developer Astrum Nival, which was part of Astrum Online, from Sergey Orlovskiy.

Founded in 2008, Nival Network develops, publishes and operates free-to-play online games in Russia and former Soviet countries. The company has game development studios in Moscow and Minsk.

Nival Network develops and operates a leading Russian online gaming and social networking portal, ZZima.com with such MMORPG titles as Dragonica; Shaiya: Light and Darkness; Cabal Online, multiplayer racer Level-R, browser-based strategy offering Khan Wars 2.0, music game RockFree, and Prime World, online strategy game with social networking features.

In January 2010, Mangrove Capital and ABRT Fund invested $4 million in social games company Drimmi.

In 2009, the Russian online games market was valued at $238 million, of which MMOGs accounted for $210 million and casual games accounted for $28 million.

Opera Software

The safe search engines and web browsers for kids include Ask Kids, KidZui, KIDO’Z, and our own Quintura for Kids.

Being the leading internet browser for desktop and mobile in Russia and Ukraine, Opera Software has decided to open an office in St. Petersburg, Russia. Headquartered in Norway, Opera has 5 employees in Russia who work remotely.

In May 2009, Opera Software bought Mobica Solutions of Poland for $2 million. Before purchase, Opera contracted consultants from Mobica.

In January 2010, Opera Software acquired mobile ad optimizer AdMarvel for $8 million, plus, an additional consideration of up to $15 million, subject to meeting certain financial targets over the next two years.

Instead, the creator of one-man-venture Chatroulette is going to visit the U.S. to talk to venture capital investors. He received few hundred emails from venture capitalists as well as from Skype and Google. No wonder, Chatroulette daily usage skyrocketed to 1.5 million users, of which one-third comes from the U.S., by spreading entirely by word of mouse. The daily usage was only 500 users last November.

In February, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures was going to reach out to Andrey and offer him a visit to NYC. It looks like he (or someone else) did. Spiegel Online, which called it “The Russian-American battle over Chatroullete” reported that Chatroulette could be valued between $13.5 million and $40.5 million.

After Facebook and Twitter, the Internet world is looking for the next big thing. Will Chatroullete be it?

The LADA branding will also appear on the overalls and team uniform of Vitaly Petrov, the first ever Russian driver in F1.

Renault F1 Team Chairman Gerard Lopez said that the agreement marks another important step Formula 1 in Russia.

Gerard Lopez also said that through Mangrove Capital they have been actively investing in Russia over the last years and know the country well. Gerard added that it is an honour for the Renault F1 Team to spearhead Russia’s entry into the sport and to carry the LADA brand at the highest level of world motorsport.

Founded in 1997, Kaspersky Lab reported revenue of $391 million in 2009, up 42% from 2008. The company generated revenue of $188 million in Europe; $97 million – in EEMEA region, $80 million – in Americas, and $26 million – in APAC region. The revenue split was as follows: consumer products – $255 million, corporate – $109 million, and technology alliances – $27 million.

Headquartered in Moscow, Kaspersky Lab employs over 1,800 including over 600 software engineers (R&D) in Russia and regional offices in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Japan, China, South Korea, Romania and the United States.

Kaspersky Lab is #4 security software vendor globally, behind Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro. Its top consumer products are Kaspersky Internet Security and Kaspersky Anti-Virus.

In 2009, Kaspersky Lab entered IDC’s Top 100 of Worldwide Packaged Software Vendors as the fastest growing software vendor and the only Russian company in the list.

Kaspersky Lab is 50% owned by its co-founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky. Board Chairman and co-founder, Natalya Kaspersky owns a 30% stake in the company.

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.

Launched in August 2009, WeiT Media currently produces sitcoms, soap operas and documentary series, and a sketch show for major Russian broadcasters, as well as two feature films and one full-length animated movie. Its 2010 revenues are estimated at $40 million. WeiT Media was founded by Russian producer Timur Weinstein. He sees the deal as strategic partnership that combines Endemol’s global scale, expertise and resources with WeiT Media experience in the Russian market.

In 2000, Timur Weinstein founded leading Russian production company Lean M where he was General Producer. In 2006,  Sony acquired a controlling stake in Lean M.

Renault President Carlos Ghosn and AvtoVAZ Board Chairman Sergey Chemezov confirmed in Moscow today that the LADA logo will be displayed together with the Renault logo on the Renault F1 cars in the 2010 season. In 2008, Renault purchased a 25% stake in AvtoVAZ.

In his early career, Vitaly Petrov won the Russian LADA Cup in 2002. He also won the LADA Revolution Championship with ten wins in 2005. The Russian team LADA Sport competed in the FIA Word Touring Car Championship (WTCC) in the 2009 season.

Renault F1 President Gerard Lopez is Managing Partner at leading European VC firm, Mangrove Capital Partners that has invested in several internet ventures in Russia, including in Quintura.

Quintura powers site search on AvtoVAZ corporate website Lada.ru.

ivi.ru has over 9,000 hours of licensed video content from one hundred content rights owners, mostly from Russia, including TV channels TNT, CTC, MTV, Muz-TV, and Stream; cinema production companies Central Partnership and Amedia, and animation film studio Souyzmultfilm. Digital Access, which will exclusively sell video ads on ivi.ru, is run by CEO Anna Znamenskaya. Previously, Anna was Commercial Director at Rambler Media.

Digital Access expects the Russian online video advertising market to reach $10 to 12 million in 2010, up from $5 million in 2009.

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.

Drimmi recently released its first social game, Рыбное Место (Fish Place). The game, which is about fishing, is available for playing on Vkontakte, the biggest Russian social network with over 60 million registered users.

Nikita Sherman, Founder & CEO of Drimmi (pictured to the left) said in an interview to BFM.ru last week that Drimmi raised $4 million from Mangrove Capital and ABRT in the first round.

He also said that the company will need the second round before it will enter global markets, likely at the end of 2010. Based in Moscow, Drimmi already opened two games development offices in Russian regional cities of Bryansk and Tolyatti.

Meantime, Facebook and Zynga investor Yuri Milner, who is CEO of largest Russian internet investor DST, said he has $1 billion to invest in social media outside of Russia.  Next ones may be Twitter and Foursquare.