print versionThe President of Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev is going met with the executive director of Google, Eric Schmidt, during his visit to the United States. Medvedev is going to spend a day in the Silicon Valley before meeting with the US president Barack Obama which is scheduled for June 24.
According to presidential aide, Arkady Dvorkovich, this choice is not accidental, and corresponds to the priorities set by the President earlier. "All the experts call the Silicon Valley and Stanford University, the most successful centers of innovation and high-tech researches. The President decided that he must see it with his own eyes," - said the presidential aide.
Medvedev also plans to meet with the head of Google, Eric Schmidt, who has already agreed to join the Foundation Board of “Skolkovo”. We wonder how hard it would be for Medvedev to please Google CEO: three years ago Google wanted to buy Russian advertising company "Begun" but the Russian government blocked the deal for anti-monopoly reasons.
Deputy head of the Russian Presidential Administration, Vladislav Surkov, said that Skolkovo will resemble Bangalore (India) rather than the Silicon Valley, for they focuses not only on information technologies in Bangalore.
A conversation with Cisco Systems top management is also on the President’s agenda. The company plans to "significantly" increase investments in the Russian economy.
Aleksey Andreev, the editor-in-chief of Webplanet.Ru, in his inteview for "Russia Today" noted that Russia boasts massive intellectual resources which could be interesting for US partners:
“Russia can help the US in terms of technologists, because it still has a pretty good mathematical school and technological school,” Andreev told RT. “And after the fall of the Soviet Union, most Russian specialists lost their jobs, some went abroad, others turned to criminal activities. Everyone knows that the best viruses are written in Russia.”
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