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The Monolit sound recording company is to sign a contract with Sony-BMG on supplies of music content that will appear on the MP3.ru website and in jukeboxes. The company declared that it will be the first Russian partner for major Western record labels. will supply Monolit a catalogue of 30,000 music tracks, where the cost of a song will be 50 cents. By the end of the year, the owners plan that up to 100,000 people a day will visit MP3.ru, with daily income up to $35,000. Music sales through vending machines could also generate a reasonable income and 300-400 units for the sale of music are planned for installation throughout the country.
This year the viral term "blog" has become actively incorporated in the minds of people with surplus cash. And this is the result: co-founder of Ingosstrakh insurance company, Corbina Telecom and the Bookberry bookshop network Alexander Mamut, along with the creator of the Afisha.ru portal Andrew Paulson, plan to launch Russia's "largest blog portal" . The investment into the project could comprise tens of millions of dollars, while it will generate income from contextual advertising. A company called Sup-Fabrik has been created to realise the project, and former Rambler President Anton Nossik has been invited to become one of the directors.
The Vedomosti newspaper reports on rumours of Sup-Fabrik's pending deals: negotiations on the purchase of the Russian part of LiveJournal.com and its Russian equivalent , talks with AOL, Google, News Corp and others. Sup representatives for now refute any talk of deals, but they do not deny that they are actively recruiting programmers and well-known players from the .ru zone into the project. A 500 sqm office has been rented in central Moscow, in the Smolensky Passage, where rates are $700-800 per 1 sqm a year. We only have to wait for the next virus-terminology, such as "social networks", to penetrate the minds of the people with money.
65% of the 30 largest banks in Russia do not have an Internet banking facility for private clients. 36% do not have this service for organisations either, despite the fact that e-banking presents a considerable saving in time, does away with queues on pay days and, on the whole, enables the client to complete over 80% of all banking operations from a remote location. However, the introduction of Internet banking requires better IT systems development and the removal of financial restrictions. For now, reports , Russia is going through a gradual development of peripheral remote banking services, such as telephone banking, WAP- and SMS-banking.
The national project "Obrazovaniye" (Education) assumes the connection to the Internet of over 50,000 educational establishments throughout the country by the end of 2007, over half of which are rural schools. The first school was connected on 28 September in the village of Novogurovsky in the Tula Region. The "last mile" for this remote region was covered using ADSL technology over a telephone line. The provider of this service, will provide unlimited 24-hour 8 Meg access, to be paid for from the federal budget, which has allocated 3 billion roubles for the program. However RTComm does not own its own communications network to connect the entire country. While there is the potential to make connections in European Russia, a separate approach is needed to address the problem on the other side of the Urals.
A portal has opened at that combines the functions of an RSS news aggregator and public rating in a format similar to that of . However, the interface of the new aggregator has none of the RSS, "tags" or other ugly English technical terms of the Web 2.0 generation. Everything is put together using the principle of urban role-play where everyone is issued a "propiska" residence permit and walks through "streets" and "prospects". There is "Politics Street", "Economics Street", "Sport Street", "Bloggers Boulevard", "Mobile Alley" and "Cinema Alley". The project creators are not talking of their business models as yet, referring instead to "beta-testing".
To enter the network of contextual advertising you now do not have to register a company or have a website with a monthly audience of over 100,000 visitors. New conditions make it possible for small websites to take part in the network (over 300 visitors a day). Owners of the Yandex.Direct partner sites receive half the profits from the showing of ads on their pages. Experts believe that the competition will struggle as Yandex expands. Google will find it harder to find a foothold in the contextual advertising niche on smaller Russian websites. What is more, a number of the partners of , which started providing similar services over a year ago and which is for now still the largest Russian contextual network in terms of the numbers involved and volume of payment, may also move over to Yandex.
, that owns an original Russian language questions-and-answers service has set up a , dedicated to the discussion of its project. The business model of the start-up is reminiscent of . Users ask questions in natural language and the company pays the authors of answers money based on the number of times their responses are visited. As regards the income from the project itself, there is for now only one arrangement: "if you need a response in the quickest possible time, you can detail a price you are prepared to pay for a response". However, it is possible that ads will appear on the site. However, the site has not yet been enjoying success with visitors. It seems that the concept of the project is just too advanced for the .ru zone.
On 27 September in Blagoveschensk in the Amur Region two girls, aged 14 and 16, jumped from a 12th-floor balcony. The investigation is looking at all options including the possibility that the girls could have been members of a sect. The press is dotted with an even greater number of suggestions. Some sources quote statistics that place the blame with the geography: in the Priamuriye region there are 60 cases of suicide for every 100,000 of the population, a third higher than in Russia as a whole. Another publication accuses the popular rock band Agatha Christie and also quotes the words of anonymous psychologists that suicide could be linked with "an early start to a sex life". The news repeats the statement than "even that morning no one could predict the pending catastrophe". Meantime, though, the state of one of the suicides is well reflected in her , which contains not a single positive record and where all entries are devoted to loneliness: "Is it worth living if you’ve already been as if dead two years?" The last entry from 20 September comes under the heading "Help?!"
73 percent of those who took part in an unofficial survey supported the idea of the owners of popular websites and blogs collecting donations, if the convenient tools to do this were available, which they are not at the moment. Only recently, Yandex launched a project called The project enables the set up of a “Give us a Rouble” button on one’s website, alongside similar “Give me three”, and even “Give me five” buttons, where a visitor, by pressing these buttons, makes a mini transfer with a single click of the mouse from his or her electronic wallet in the system to the wallet of the site creator. This is more convenient than publication of account numbers and it is more cost-effective than SMS texting (the operator takes half of the text payment). However, there is a clear shortcoming and that is that far from all users in the .ru zone use the Yandex.Money payment system.
Librarianship is an entire sector, with its own traditions. The Russian State Library has a duty policeman to combat vandalism. And rightly so, as there are Moscovites who avoid the cost of photocopying and prefer to rip pages from books. But as soon as information leaves its printed form and becomes electronic, no one is responsible for its fate. To ensure the mass of publications by the major newspaper finds itself beyond the zone of access, all that was required is to dump the website search facility. Can you imagine that the Russian State Library withdrew the binding of newspapers only because the style changed? Yet it is no problem to cater for a change in the design of a website. Even online magazines have contrived to deprive the user of access to archives. Apparently, we need a vertical power structure and Putin in for a third term to make something like the or .
