Direct Group

Founded in 2006, Astrostar.ru creates and distributes astrological content to consumers via its own web-site and online portals such as Rambler, Mail.ru and KM.ru. The users can pay for content via SMS, credit cards and online money.

Direct Group, which owns major interest in leading Russian women-centric portal WomanJournal.ru, also invested in online shopping club KupiVIP.ru, group purchasing service KupiBonus.ru and online shoe store Sapato.ru.

Quintura URL Info is a small and useful app (just 80 kB) that runs in the background mode while you surf the web on your mobile phone.

When you are going to follow a link, you could never be sure to get exactly what you wanted. It’s not a problem if you’re sitting at home or in your office with a laptop / desktop with broadband internet connection and limitless traffic. But if the same thing happens with your mobile device, then you surely wish to get what you want.

That is exactly the reason behind the release of Quintura URL Info. You click on the link and our application analyzes the page you are going to visit and offers you the page summary. It saves you an expensive mobile traffic (some tens of kilobytes per page) and an upload time (the page with all pictures). Besides the page contents, you can view the saved traffic and keywords highlighted on the page by Quintura.

The application is available on Adroid Market for 0.99

http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.quintura.urlinfofull

Quintura URL Info

Quintura’

The iPhone visual search app for web and image search Quintura Search is available at iTunes App Store.

Quintura Kids, a safe and visual way for kids to learn how to explore the web using a tag cloud, is also available at App Store.

More information about Quintura’s visual search for iPhone is at Quintura Mobile page at http://mobile.quintura.com/

We plan to release new search apps for iPhone as well as launch Quintura Kids and Quintura Cook for Android (via Android Market) and Symbian (via Ovi Store).

Having recently acquired full control in Mail.ru from Naspers, DST, which plans IPO in London in 2011, plans to consolidate its holdings in other Russian internet ventures ahead of the IPO. DST could be valued at $6 billion at IPO next year.

Founded in March 2006, Odnoklassniki.ru generated revenues of $49 million in 2009 from display advertising, paid services, contextual links and social games. Odnoklassniki.ru‘s net income reached $11 million in 2009.

Odnoklassniki, which has 45 million registered accounts, attracts 10 million daily users.

Darberry‘s previous investor eVenture Capital Partners, which also co-invested in this round, should have shopped the deal to Groupon. In early 2010, eVenture Capital sold German group discount site CityDeal to Groupon. In 2010, Darberry got first funding from Russian internet incubator AddVenture.

Launched in March 2010, Darberry.ru has more than 180,000 subscribers. The site claimes that it saved almost $0.5 million to its subscribers since launch. Darberry currently operates in seven Russian cities. The Darberry service shall expand in other cities in Russia as well as in Ukraine with the new funding.

Russia’s leading internet investment holding Digital Sky Technologies (via its affiliate DST Global) contributed a majority of Groupon’s latest funding of $135 million in April 2010.

In July 2010, ABRT Fund and Mangrove Capital invested in Russian group purchasing service KupiBonus.ru. The site focuses on selling beauty service coupons to women.

Sport 1 will broadcast all ten football matches of each match day of the Barclays Premier League in England. The matches will be shown in HD quality. Up to three Premier League matches of each match day will be shown on Rossiya 2, a free-to-air Russia-nationwide TV channel owned by VGTRK.

VGTRK acquired the rights for the Premier League for the next three years for more than $10 million from Advisers Media International (AMI), according to newspaper Kommersant. AMI won the Premier League rights for Russia last May.

The list of top 10 online display advertisers in Russia in H1 2010 (according to MindShare Interaction) includes:

1. Procter & Gamble (220 million Rubles or $7.3 million),

2. Renault-Nissan (182 million Rubles or $6.1 millon),

3. MTS (135 million Rubles or $4.5 million),

4. Megafon (126 million Rubles or $4.2 million),

5. Volkswagen Audi Group (110 million Rubles or $3.7 million),

6. VimpelCom (102 million Rubles or $3.4 million),

7. Peugeout Citroen (86 million Rubles or $2.9 million),

8. Samsung (70 million Rubles or $2.3 million),

9. LG Electronics (67 million Rubles or $2.2 million)

10. Nokia (59 million Rubles or $2.0 million)

It is noticable that Procter & Gamble has become top online display advertiser in Russia for the first time. P&G increased its online display ad spendings by 5 times: from 44 million Rubles in H1 2009 to 220 million Rubles in H1 2010. P&G is the biggest TV advertiser in Russia with TV ad spendings estimated at 1,500 million Rubles in H1 2010.

It is estimated that the car manufacturers in Russia spent 750 million Rubles ($25 million) on online display advertising in H1 2010 while FMCG companies were the second biggest spenders with 600 million Rubles ($20 million).

Axel Springer Russia and Forbes won a domain name law suit last January. However, Landmark VIP Services disagreed with that decision and filed an appellation that was then approved. The two parties finally reached a settlement regarding the Forbes.ru domain name.

Axel Springer launched Forbes Russia online at Forbesrussia.ru in September 2009. Forbes is a leading Russian business magazine with an average circulation of 110,000 copies and more than 820,000 monthly readers. Axel Springer, which also publishes Newsweek and ComputerBild magazines in Russia, extended publishing cooperation with Forbes in Russia until 2020.

In November 2009, Axel Springer acquired the Russian business of German publisher G+J (Gruner+Jahr).

Launched in February 2009, Wikimart has over 2,000 online merchants that offer over 410,000 products. Wikimart‘s merchants generate a monthly sales turnover of $1.5 million. The site, which has 150,000 monthly visitors (according to Rating@Mail.ru), earnes some 3 percent of sales revenues generated by the merchants.

Wikimart was founded by Russian entrepreneurs Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev in June 2008 who were Stanford MBA students at that time. Wikimart, which is based in Moscow, employs 50 people.

Tiger Global Management recently invested $10 million in online travel sales site Anywayanyday in Russia. Tiger is also an investor in Russian search engine Yandex. Previously, Tiger was an investor in leading Russian online portal Mail.ru.

The Russian ecommerce market is going to reach $6 billion in 2010. In January 2010, online shopping club KupiVIP.ru raised $20 million from Accel Partners and other investors. German Otto Group-backed eVenture Capital Partners invested in daily coupon site Darberry and online shoe store Sapato while Mangrove Capital and ABRT Fund invested in beauty coupon site Beaucoup.ru.

Quintura’

Quintura Search for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch is available at iTunes App Store.

Quintura Kids, a safe and visual way for kids to learn how to explore the web using a tag cloud, is already available at App Store.

Next, there is Quintura Cook. More information is at Quintura Mobile page at http://mobile.quintura.com/

With several million new iPhones and iPads being sold every month and over 100 million iPhones being used around the world, Quintura‘s innovative visual search apps shall become popular quite shortly.

We also plan to release Quintura Kids and Quintura Cook for Android (via Android Market) and Symbian (via Ovi Store).

Digital Sky Technologies

DST hired investment banks Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan to manage the IPO.

DST, which recently consolidated 100% stake in Mail.ru from Naspers, plans to consolidate 100% of Odnoklassniki.ru. In addition, DST holds significant minority stakes in social network Vkontakte.ru, online recruiting firm HH.ru (HeadHunter), instant payment terminal operator OE Investments (QIWI), and others.

Prof-Media

Olga Turischeva, who became Rambler CEO in April 2009, is going to leave Rambler Media by the year-end. The Rambler-owner Prof Media has appointed Nikolay Molibog as new CEO of Rambler. Previously, Nikolay Molibog was CEO of Afisha publishing house, which is owned by Prof Media.

Afisha publishes leading entertainment content magazines and web-sites Afisha.ru and NightParty.ru while Rambler operates a leading online portal in Russia, Rambler.ru.

Rambler‘s search market share in Russia decreased from 4.9% in March 2009 to 2.6% in June 2010, according to LiveInternet.ru. Rambler‘s advertising revenues declined over the past year. The expenses declined even faster, which improved operational profitability but that may be not enough for Olga Turischeva to stay in. She could re-join Vimpelcom (Beeline) where she worked prior to Rambler.