Fabrice also admitted that OLX acquired a Russian free classifieds site FreeAds.ru. The deal should have closed in the summer 2007 when the site started forwarding its visitors to OLX.ru

OLX faces major completion in Russia from Slando.ru (part of a free online classifieds network in Eastern Europe owned by eBay via Kijiji), Avito.ru, a free classifieds site owned by the yellow-pages business Kontakt East Holding, and IRR.ru, online version of classifieds newspaper Iz Ruk v Ruki (From Hand to Hand) owned by Trader Media East.

OLX.ru has 300 thousand monthly site visitors, Slando.ru - 700 thousand, Avito.ru - 1 million, and IRR.ru has 2.5 million visitors per month, according to Internet statistics service LiveInternet.ru.

Avito recently stroke a deal with Russia’s leading blogging business LiveJournal to advertise classifieds from Avito on LiveJournal.ru pages. By clicking Avito ads, the LiveJournal visitors go a special online auction page LiveJournal-Bazar.

While the largest free classifieds site Craigslist (partly owned by eBay) lacks presence in developing Internet markets as well as web 2.0 features, it leaves room for its emerging competitors such as OLX to win in those markets, including in Russia.

As an example of a brand advertisement, we have embedded a graphical ad (ReadWriteWeb favicon) next to a keyword in the widget’s search cloud. By clicking the favicon next to keyword “search” in the cloud, the searchers will go to a post about top 100 alternative search engines on ReadWriteWeb.

Quintura recently launched a special offer Happy Spring! for web publishers and content owners that will embed Quintura search widget

After embedding the widget to its site, a content owner can select a keyword related to the site and display a favorite icon (favicon) next to the selected keyword in the search cloud on Quintura.com for a week.The favicon will have direct hyperlink to the site. When someone makes a search for a topic related to context of the selected keyword, both keyword and favicon will be displayed in the Quintura search cloud on Quintura.com.

Charles Knight, the editor of AltSearchEngines will run the first Annual Day without Google on April 1st. He will publish a list of top 100 alternative search engines and ask readers to try any of them and not to use Google for one day.

Andrew Paulson, President of SUP Media told in his interview to a Russian weekly business magazine that SUP plans to acquire several companies and grow them by leveraging the LiveJournal audience. SUP bought out Championat.ru in November 2006. The site is now the most-visited sports portal in Russia with 1.5 million monthly users.

Update: ITV broadband Managing Director Annelies Van Den Belt will join SUP as new Russian General Manager on June 1st. She used to be publisher of The Moscow Times newspaper.

President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin signed a decree awarding Patricia Cloherty the Order of Friendship on March 17, 2008.

Delta Private Equity Partners is the manager of The U.S. Russia Investment Fund and Delta Russia Fund, L.P., two venture capital funds with over $500 million invested in more than fifty Russian companies.

Patricia Cloherty is former Co-Chairman, President and General Partner of Apax Partners, Inc. (formerly Patricof & Co. Ventures, inc.), a multi-billion-dollar private equity company that she joined in 1970, and from which she withdrew in 2000.

Some of the noticeable recent investments and exits of Delta include a sale IT system integrator CompuLink to private equity funds; sale of TV channel TV3 to Prof-Media at 12.8 times cost, sale of DeltaCredit Bank to Societe Generale at 2.5 times cost, and sale of DeltaBank to GE Consumer Finance at 4 times cost.

The current investment portfolio of Delta includes provider of video security solutions VideoNext and producer of pay-TV channels Almirida.

Metromax was started in Samara in 2005. The company operates its own WiMAX networks in the Russian regional cities of Samara and Ulianovsk as well as builds networks in Orenburg and Saratov.

According to Alfa Bank, the Russian broadband market was valued over $1 billion in 2007.

Volga River One Capital Partners, which manages some $230 million private equity capital, has previously invested in computer retailer White Wind - Digital, auto dealer Genser, and sports goods maker Sprandi.

According to STC, its revenues reached $12 million in 2007 with EBITDA of $3 million. Over 30 percent of revenues came from sales outside of Russia. STC recently released RUSSOGRAPH, the first commercial speech-to-text technology for continuous Russian speech. STC plans to launch a series of a new products based on the RUSSOGRAGH technology in 2008 including IVR-systems for call-centers, audio data mining systems and voice command recognition technologies.

Quadriga Capital Russia, which is a sister company of Quadriga Capital of Germany, manages a $136 million Quadriga Capital Russia Private Equity Fund II for direct investments into mid-sized Russian businesses. The company has Russian offices in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhni Novgorod. The investors into the fund include the EBRD, IFC, 3i, Deutsche Entwicklungs- und Investitionsgesellschaft, Sal. Oppenheim Bank, Bank Gutmann Aktiengesellschaft, and Evli Bank.

Quadriga recently invested into Tascom wireless broadband operator in Russia. In October 2005, Quadriga together with Intel Capital invested in Akella, a leading Russian publisher and distributor of computer and console games.

RuTube, which has 400 thousand daily users and more than 40 million video views per month, could generate monthly revenues of $400 thousand. The RuTube founders were inspired by Google’s acquisition of YouTube and launched the site in November 2006 from the provincial Russian city of Oriol.

Kommersant also cities that ABRT venture fund (an investor in visual-based search engine Quintura) offered to invest in RuTube at about $5 million valuation in early summer 2007.

Gazprom-Media is one of the largest media holdings in Russia and Europe. Among other media properties, it owns popular Russian TV channels NTV and TNT that already started broadcasting TV shows on RuTube.

RuTube was one of the first to online video community market in Russia. It also early released its API to allow partner sites hosting videos on RuTube.ru and displaying them on their own sites. To attract early users, RuTube started broadcasting some regional TV channels online as well as show football matches and special launch events live. The company began deploying its own backbone network in Moscow and other regional cities in autumn 2007.

The other online video sharing sites operating in Russia include Video@Mail.ru, Rambler Vision, and YouTube.

The leading Russian web company Yandex is rumored to do IPO on NASDAQ at a multi-billion valuation in 2008. The other Western IPO candidates include the IT services and system integration companies IBS Group and Verysell, virtualization software vendor Parallels, security software company Kaspersky Lab, and accounting and multimedia software vendor 1C Company. Russia is going to become the second largest Internet population in Europe by the end of 2008 while the Russian internet advertising market is expected to increase to $0.7 billion in 2008.

While Silicon Valley may be ignoring the rest of the world in light of potential economic recession, the Russian media companies have started expanding abroad. The Russian group Finam bought a stake in Badoo social network in the U.K., mobile entertainment provider Playfon acquired mobile community Wappy.to from Denmark, and A1 Group acquired AFM Cinemas in Turkey.

The Russian President Vladimir Putin, Time’s 2007 Person of the Year named Dmitry Medvedev his successor last year.

Dmitry Medvedev has been the first deputy prime minister of Russia for the past two years. He is 42 years old from St. Petersburg. Dmitry has legal background. He is a regular Internet user.

In his interview to Business Week in December 2007, Dmitry Medvedev said: “I want to preserve [Putin’s] course, simply because it has shown that it can work. Our citizens have begun to live better. Living standards are rising. The most important social problems are being solved. Not as fast as we’d like, but it’s happening. I think that continuing on the path of modern, stable development over several decades will turn Russia into one of the most developed countries in the world. Today we’re already one of the 10 largest economies. The macroeconomic situation isn’t bad. But it’s obvious that there’s a lot left to do.”

Here is a picture of Dimitry Medvdev (left) talking to Vladimir Putin (right).

Learn more about Dimtry Medvedev via Quintura.com