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. Sony-BMG 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.

Under the Rambler on the Map project only Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg and certain of their respective suburbs are currently accessible. Omsk, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara and Toliatti are to be the next cities to appear. The list of maps includes (albeit in an inactive format) a map of Russia and a map of the World. However the Rambler maps unfortunately hold no information for drivers. Not even one-way streets are detailed (as they are in Google Maps and Yandex.Maps).

The barges on the Frunzenskaya Embankment of the Moscow River, which house a number of the capital’s IT companies, have been disconnected from the water supply and the sewerage system, and they now face disconnection from power as well. Mayor Yuri Luzhkov announced in early September the intention to get rid of the barges. The authorities are annoyed that the rental of a square metre of water is 60 times less than the going rate on land in the centre of the city. Officials are now citing different reasons for the disconnections on the barges: excessive effluent discharge into the river, too high a water and electricity consumption or simply "preparations for winter".

One of the barges is home to Konstantin Rykin’s New Media Stars Consulting, where the well-known publications Dni.Ru, Vzglyad, Bourgeoisny Zhurnal and the dating service Neznakomka.ru are all created. Another barge is used as a floating office for several television projects of the company ViD.

Specialised stores generate the trust of the majority of Russian Internet users – 95% of the total number approached in a survey for ROMIR Monitoring. 2296 active Internet users aged over 20 were given the chance to respond. Shopping centres were the second most popular, with 62%. With that, when choosing expensive electronics, mobile telephones, photography equipment and domestic appliances, furniture and household goods, only a third of users make purchases over the Internet. Visitors to Internet stores are either people who earn over 25,000 roubles a month (39%) or residents of Moscow (41%). Even in St. Petersburg the popularity of the Internet is 4 times lower (10%), not to mention the provinces.

From the start of the "electronic" ticket sales service, passengers have acquired 14,500 such tickets on the Moscow - St. Petersburg route. OAO Russian Railways introduced this service in only May 2006. Tickets are purchased using bank cards, with tickets being issued only at the terminals in Moscow and St. Petersburg. From the 1st January 2007 the "electronic" ticket service will be introduced over all routes operated by Russian Railways. Previously, completing a form on the website was no guarantee of a reservation being made. Now, though, it states in the regulations on electronic ticket purchase that at the moment of acquisition and payment the original ticket is printed on Russian Railways letterhead at the chosen collection point and will remain guaranteed until the passenger comes to collect it.

In 1999 the organisation IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) formed the working group IDN (Internationalized Domain Name), authorising it to devise how to register domain names with the symbols from international alphabets. We are now in 2006, but where are the Russian domains Producers of browsers are in no hurry to give full support to the solution proposed by IDN, through security concerns. This solution opens up scope for fishing – net fraud, when users are lured to false websites, the addresses of which use Cyrillic letters, similar to Latin equivalents. Although ICANN has developed a system of recommendations, the administrators of international domains have themselves to resolve the issue of domains that contain symbols of the national alphabet. This matter has still to be resolved in the Russian zone.