Google isn’t only having to play the patient party in the U.S. in its joint search advertising effort with Yahoo. According to a story in Monday’s edition of the Russian business daily Vedomosti, Google must wait another few weeks past the originally expected decision day of September 22 to see its agreed $140m purchase of contextual ad service Begun completed. Russia’s FAS, or Federal Antimonopoly Service, is slated to conduct the review on October 22. The reason for postponement: they want more details.

A translation provided by Google of Vedomosti’s revelation, also summarized by Yakov Sadchikov of Quintura, essentially notes that there is a strong chance that the transaction will been green-lighted. Alexei Basov, CEO of Begun, also thinks as much.

It seems there is hint of potential controversy to the tale, however. The computer-generated interpretation of Monday’s article appears to say that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin voiced “displeasure” about the sale to “American Google.” This is according a source purportedly familiar with Rambler management. Rambler is the agreed seller of Begun. Rambler CEO Rafael Akopov hasn’t commented on the matter.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:So, That’s Why Google Bought Russian Ad Company BegunGoogle Buys Russian Contextual Ad Service BegunPOSTPONED: MashMeet NYC REMIXGoogle TV Screws the Middleman (i.e. Apple)Google Maps Get More Social with Comments and RatingsVirgin America Ticket Raffle - 2 Free Roundtrip TicketsGoogle’s Hopes for Government Websites

Multimedia search provider blinkx has announced a distribution partnership with Getty Images today. The partnership brings blinkx search technology to the Getty Images database. Apparently it’s easier to search for images on Getty using the blinkx search rather than the search on the Getty Images site.

blinkx will use their ad platform, AdHoc, to serve ads next to the images from the Getty Images library. Revenue will be shared between both companies.

Last month blinkx made an offer to acquire Miva and this year they have formed a variety of partnerships with Revision3 and the BBC.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

Source:CenterNetworks

comScore has released new stats for European Internet usage based on their World Metrix audience measurement service today. The report shows that Russia is leading Europe in Internet audience growth followed by France, Spain and Ireland. Russia’s Internet audience grew 27% from June 2007-June 2008.

As for Internet penetration in Europe, The Netherlands leads with 82% of the total population online. The Netherlands is followed by Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Switzerland. Based on what I am seeing, Switzerland appears to be pushing out the most new startups out of the top 5 European Internet penetration countries.

If Twitter were down for one, two, or even three consecutive days, would you crack? For the heaviest, most avid of users, I think yes. But when the microblogging service Jaiku, acquired some 9-10 months ago by Google, told its users to take a weekend breather the past couple of days, few in the blog world raised the issue. Zach Epstein at the Boy Genius Report jumped on it, made a quick joke. But other than he, there seems to be little in the way of OMGs, WTFs, and various other three- and four-letter caps-sized exclamations.

However, having looked at responses by Jaiku Invites and ZDNet’s Googling Google blogger Garett Rogers, it appears that the service isn’t quite “down for the count,” so to speak. Instead, there’s morsel-sized evidence Jaiku is taking this short hiatus to enact a real shift in performance to give Jaiku that extra umph on the Google App Engine people have anticipated for a number of weeks now.

Indeed, the company did mention earlier this month that it was moving its wares over to the App Engine, and it delivered a few words on the Jaikido Blog about the effort to port the thing as it was underway. But this new memo asking everyone - users, visitors, woops-wrong-turners - to take a breather may well bring about that gleeful and long-awaited phew-ahhh troubled members have been waiting for. Otherwise, it’s just, you know, a few days of downtime. Which even on the Twitter barometer circa Q1 and Q2 2008, would connote doom, gloom, and nasty scarring to boot.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Jaiku Releases New Microblogging Tool for Nokia S60Jaiku on Your iPhoneA Day Without Jaiku…WidSets to Launch Jaiku WidgetJaiku Hosting Markku’s Channel for Eurovision 2007Will Google Use Jaiku to Collect Data on You?Jaiku’s New Mobile App to be Unveiled at Supernova

Source:Mashable!

The Russian search giant Yandex, a site of multi-purpose design, has made quite a bit of news as of late. Eight years of growth has allow its revenue to increase from about $400,000 to a reported $167 million in 2007. And as we let known earlier this year, the company, currently comprised of some 1,200 employees, plans to introduce itself on the NASDAQ stock exchange this autumn.

The most recent profile of the company comes from the Times of London, which seems to peg it squarely against Google. In short, Times reporter Mark Franchetti, with Yandex co-founder and chief executive Arkady Volozh taking to the spotlight, paints the company as a serious challenge to the Mountain View, CA-based Web giant on the Eurasian landscape. For one, it commandeers 55% of the Russian market. Google, on the other hand, holds 21%.

The challenges posed by both forces are in fact quite interesting to observe at present. Google just last month purchased a Russian contextual ad firm by the name of Begun, formerly a Rambler Media property, for $140 million. Presumably it was in order to capitalize on solid growth in Russia’s Internet sector as well as invest in a greater percentage of the search pie in the region. At least while the taking is still good, anyway. Though Google holds a portion less than half the size of Yandex, its position is not so firmly set in place as it is in more Western reaches of the world.

Of course, Yandex recognizes this fact, and so it is wasting no time to push hard for its own growth. That goes as much for the Russian market as places outside its border. It was said just this week that Yandex has significantly upgraded its data connections to Ukraine. And earlier still, it make it a point to mention upgrades to its search engine to support so-called world standards and enhance users’ access to video to better compete with the ever-advancing Google.

Yet the growth of Yandex may not impact Google world ranking as much as some, like the Times, have intimated. 33 million Russian citizens are said to be using the Web. That number is expected to nearly double in five years’ time. A sizable figure, for sure. Looking at recent estimates of Russia’s total population, however, which sits at around 142 million, down from a purported 145 million in 2002, the penetration rate of Web services does not nearly match that of Western audiences. The U.S., for example, home to some 300 million people, is over 70% connected, with an estimated 219 million users. Europe as a whole sits just shy of the 50% mark. Germany, Norway, UK, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden, all show rates similar to that of the US. France is about 55%.

That said, there’s no question Yandex is capitalizing fully on Russia’s measured ascent in Internet development. According to Quintura, a search company itself, Yandex has become something of a household name in its home state, and in so doing intends to go so far as to refresh its logo to an entirely Cyrillic designation, rather than the largely English-language label it has maintained.

Semantics aside, it is becoming increasingly evident that what was for a number of years a very Western-influenced Internet marketplace has internationalized greatly, to the point that actors in China (Baidu, et al.) and, to somewhat lesser degree, Russia, have achieved heavyweight or near-heavyweight status. That goes for search as well as social networking service, video channels, and Web software. And it’s perhaps safe to say that current trends will continue. Of course, it’s highly unlikely that Google will hurt as a result. Virtually all large markets around the world have considerable room left to expand. Only, those of China and Russia have more fresh terrain from which to sow financial largesse, so to speak.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Report: Russian Search Leader Yandex Set for Massive IPOLast.fm Coming to Moscow through Partnership with LiveJournalYouTube Mobile, Yandex, Orkut Polls, Amazon PPA, FunMobility, Motorola, MobilePlay, The Onion, Jott, CongooGoogle Answers to Make Triumphant Return?Odnoklassniki.ru Set To Top $30 Million In RevenueMySpace Speaking Portuguese, Russian, Polish and MoreGoogle: Vulnerable After All?

Google is under fire today over reports claiming the company failed to include any data for Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan on Google maps.  Worse, some reports suggest that once the fighting broke out between Russia and Georgia, all relevant information about the latter was wiped from Google maps.

According to the Azerbaijan Press agency, all “the relevant maps went blank as soon as fighting broke out.”  But Google contends that that assertion is simply false and it has not changed anything in quite some time.

“Google has not made any recent change to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in Google Maps,” the company said in a statement. “We do not have local data for those countries and that is why local details such as landmarks and cities do not appear.”

In response to even more public outcry, Google Maps product manager, Dave Barth, said Google failed to include relevant street and city information because it wasn’t satisfied with available map data.  But in an attempt to quell user distress, Barth said that Google would now input basic information about all of these countries instead of leave them blank.

And while some users are applauding Google for doing just that, I think it begs the question of whether or not Google should populate countries regardless of the quality of data, or if it should leave countries blank until it has the data necessary to make the maps as accurate as possible.

The way I see it, Google has no responsibility to its users to populate every country in the world if it feels it can’t provide them with the most accurate information available.  Along those lines, why would users even want data that Google feels isn’t the best on maps of countries that aren’t generally the most searched for in the world anyway?

As far as I’m concerned, maps should be kept blank if the data isn’t sufficient to populate them and if users don’t like it, well, that’s their problem.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Google Maps Hangs Up on Click-to-CallGoogle Offers Easy Embed Code for MapsCustom Icons for Google MapsGoogle Maps in (Almost) 3DVisualize Recent Edits to Google MapsAdSense is Coming to Google MapsGoogle Maps Street View

Quintura is reporting that the founder of Metalloinvest holding and owner of Kommersant publishing house, Alisher Usmanov is seeking a 10-20% stake in Russian search engine Yandex. Based on the current valuation for Yandex of $5 billion, this puts Usmanov’s stake at up to $1 billion.

Usmanov and his companies have minority stakes in the holding companies for mail.ru and Live Journal. This type of deal could put Usmanov into a strong position with the largest Russian mail provider and the largest Russian search engine. In case you were wondering, Yandex currently has 54% market share in Russian search while Google is at 19%.

Check out our exclusive interview with Yandex CTO Ilya Segalovich to learn more about the largest search engine in Russia.

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Swiss-based Dixero has announced that they have raised a new round of funding in the amount of 1.5 million Euros. This brings their total funding to 3 million Euros. Last week Dixero announced the opening of an office in Silicon Valley.

Dixero provides a way to take RSS feeds and convert them to audio so that you can listen to your favorite feeds instead of reading them in a "traditional" sense. Dixero offers three "audio personalities", Lois, Luke and Claire so that you can vary the voice that you hear for different feeds. It can help with differentiation from one feed to the next.

We’ve also reviewed BlogBard and PimpMyNews - two other feed-to-audio services. The key to these services is to make the voice as close to human as possible.

Here’s an example of the Dixero audio conversion - it sounds "computerized" (it looks like you need some sort of xml plugin - IE is asking me to install something for this to play):

Here’s the 20-second pitch Dixero provided earlier this month in Zurich:

Partner Links
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Source:CenterNetworks

Yakov is reporting that Digital Sky Technologies has obtained an additional 15% stake in Mail.ru from Tiger Global Management for $180-200 million. This moves Digital Sky Technologies’ into the majority stakeholder position with 50.6%. Yakov also notes, "It’s also reported that DST could be selling a controlling stake in itself to Alisher Usmanov, founder of Metalloinvest and owner of Kommersant publishing house. Kommersant recently merged its online newspaper Gazeta.ru into LiveJournal’s owner SUP."

Mail.ru has 6.2 million daily visitors and 14.7 million monthly visitors and one of the stakeholders reported income of $56 million for year 2007. DST’s assets range somewhere between $1.1 billion and $3 billion.

Mail.ru was voted one of the top Web sites in Russia earlier this year.

Yakov is reporting that Russian financial group Finam along with a group of Russian investors have acquired a minority stake in Deluxe Television. There are plans to increase the share to 50% by year-end. Deluxe Television is a Munich-based broadcaster of music television channels. Yakov notes a daily audience for Deluxe Television of 5 million people and he explains the current state of Deluxe Television:

Founded in 2004, Deluxe owns a free-to-air music television channel, Deluxe Music, seven pay-TV music channels (rock, soul, lounge, jazz, etc), two radio stations, the music label Sashimi Records. It also has an online shop where users can download songs and buy DVDs, CDs and merchandise. Deluxe tests a high-definition music channel to be launched later in 2008.

You might remember the name Finam as they were the venture capital firm for Russian contextual ad firm Begun which was recently acquired by Google.

Partner Links
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Back in January, Julie Alexandria took over as Wallstrip host.  Today Wallstrip has re-launched their site and video player. There’s an updated archive show finder, threaded comments along with the ability to note if you are long or short on the stocks they create videos for.

The player is the big update in my opinion. It’s now branded CBS and has pre-roll and post-roll ads. In my tests, there were 30 second and 15 second pre-roll ads on different video loads along with 15 second post-roll ads. The pre-roll ads included Blackberry and Brita. A minute of commercials for a video that’s less than 3 minutes long - over 25% of the total time is taken up with ads!

I guess the days of OptionsXpress ads are over.

Here’s today’s show featuring PapaJohns. I can’t say that I find Wallstrip funny or interesting but clearly some others do.

Partner Links
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Source:CenterNetworks

Yakov is reporting that Prague-based game and software publisher 1C Company has agreed to aquire Russian video game creator Buka. The deal is reported at an estimated $80 million. BUKA generated revenues of $35 million and EBITDA of $10 million in 2007.

Yakov notes regarding Buka, "BUKA, which was founded in 1993, has 250 employees. BUKA published games Far Cry, Half Life series, War Hammer 40,000: Dawn of Warfrom from Western publishers including THQ, Ubisoft, Valve, Codemasters, Lesta Studio, Targem, and CDV."

Check out the list of the top 10 Russian Web sites and the top Russian search engines.