Founded in 2006, Evernote has 2 million users. The service, which is available in English and Russian, works online and on mobile devices BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Palm Pre as well as on Windows and Mac computers.

Evernote utilizes a “freemium” business model. The basic service is free but offers a limited amount of online storage space. For a small monthly fee, users get more storage, increased security and can share notes.

Founded in 1998 as reseller of printing equipment, Sun (компания Сан) established its own R&D lab in 2005. The company now manufactures and sells UV and solvent wide format printers, laser and milling engravers, cutting plotters, LED displays, UV-LED units, UV and solvent Ink Sunflower. Sun is the only global maker of UV-LED printers, universal wide format printers for direct printing on almost any type of material: plastic, wood, glass, metal, tile, banner and even on non-thermostable materials (paper, thin films, foam plastic).

Sun is headquartered in Novosibirsk and employs more than 300 people. It has sales and service offices in Russian cities and abroad (China, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine). The company that reported revenues of $13 million in 2008 is owned by Vladislav MIrchev and led by CEO Natalia Stasyuk.

According estimates from RUSNANO, the global UV-printer market, which is valued at $607 million in 2008, is expected to grow to $989 million in 2013. The global UV-ink market, which is valued at $248 million in 2008, is expected to reach $407 million in 2013.

Nano-Optic Devices

Founded in 2007, Nano-Optic Devices employs a team of 17 scientists in offices in New Jersey, USA and Moscow region, Russia. Nano-Optic Devices’ founder and CEO Vladimir Yankov, who invented the digital planar holography technology, was a principal scientist with the Kurchatov Atomic Energy Institute in Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and worked in areas of theoretical physics including nuclear fusion, plasma and nonlinear physics.

The Digital Planar Holograms developed by Nano-Optic Devices are as small as a few cubic millimeters and can be coupled directly with a fiber, a ridge waveguide, and/or a detector array. This results in a dramatic reduction in size and weight of a spectrometer, integrated on a chip.

S-Group Direct Investments fund (SGDI), which is under the management of S-Group Capital Management, is a controlling shareholder of Nano-Optic Devices.

S-Group Ventures

Founded in 2003, Spectralus Corporation (Спектралюс) developed a green laser microchip for use in mobile projectors. Spectralus makes periodically poled MgO-doped LiNbO3 (PPMgOLN) crystal products. The company, which is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, has a Russian subsidiary company in Moscow. Spectralus founder and CEO Stepan Essaian previously worked as Chief Scientist for Solid State Photonix/Teraburst Networks and before that at National Semiconductor. Stepan Essaian holds D.Sc. and Ph.D in Solid State Physics and Optoelectronics from Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia.

S-Group Direct Investments fund (SGDI), which is under the management of S-Group Capital Management, is a controlling shareholder of Spectralus Corporation.

S-Group Capital Management is a private equity and venture capital management company based in Moscow, Russia. The main benefactor of the company is Alexei Mordashov, the key shareholder and CEO of multinational steel company Severstal.

“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.

The block with site search results is made dynamic in order to help your site users pay more attention to a search cloud.

The block is hidden until users mouse over or click any word/phrase in the cloud.

Then the respective search results will pop up below the search cloud.

The number of search result links and annotations can be changed in Publisher account settings on Quintura site for Affiliates.

We believe that this feature will improve user experience and increase a number of search result clicks.

If you need help with implementation of Quintura search cloud for your site, please write us to publisher at quintura dot com.

To try this new feature, please check the site search widget in the left sidebar on this blog.

Russia’s largest Internet company Yandex, which reported revenues of more than $300 million and net income of $100 million in 2008, said its portal had 9.3 million daily users and 19.2 million monthly users in June 2009, according to TNS Russia.

The comScore ranking does not include search data from Russia’s leading online portal, Mail.ru, where Yandex powers web search. If this data were included into comScore calculations, Yandex would be ranked ahead of Ask with more than 2 billion searches per month.

According to comScore, Google held 67.9 percent share of global searches in June 2009, ahead of Baidu of China (9.5%), Yahoo! (8.9%), Bing (Microsoft) with 2.9%, Naver of South Korea (2.1%), and Ask (1.6%).

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.

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?