Microsoft has opened the first Russian Innovation Centre in the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI). The Innovation Centre unites people from the IT industry, from students to representatives of government organizations. The centre provides services in three areas. The first is accumulation of intellectual capital, including courses on software development, student training and employment programmes. The second area relates to partner programmes in software licensing. The third and most important area of the Centre is the development of software. Microsoft partners will also take part in the operation of the Centre.

By 2007 the company Electrocom plans to connect 12,000 Moscow houses to the Internet over electrical wiring, using PLC technology. For now only 200 houses have been connected. PLC has a multitude of advantages: there is no need for additional wires and the speed of a PLC modem could reach up to 20–100 Meg. Unfortunately, today’s level of PLC development is enough for data transmission only inside a house (1.5 – 2km). Further development depends much on the quality of the electrical wiring in Russia.

The social network Comby.ru has acquired the websites Blogger.ru and Blog.ru. The company refused to detail the price of the acquisition but famous cybersquatter Pavel Gross believes that the sum paid for the Blog.ru domain could equal 25-50,000 dollars. The Blogger.ru domain should cost a lot less, at a few thousand dollars. It should be noted that LiveInternet.ru, the second most popular blog service in the .ru zone according to the Yandex Blog Search, achieved its popularity without such supergeneric words.

The Mail.ru portal has launched a videohosting service called Video.mail.ru. The company’s General Director Dmitry Grishin hopes that a million users will visit the project in the first month. Videos are shown using Flash Player and many formats are supported: Windows Media Video, QuickTime, MPEG1/2/4, DV and mobile 3GP. For now the business model involves the user being able to send an SMS-text (0.99 USD) and thus announcing their video clip on the home page. And those that always wish to be at the top of the list have to send texts over and over.

The Federal Tax Service has decided that taxpayers will find it more convenient to submit accounts and declarations in electronic form. This facility has been around since 2002, but only a quarter of Moscow’ businessmen decided to switch over, with the figure even lower in the regions. In the words of one businessman interviewed by the "Business" newspaper, the system is "ugly". Earlier this year there was an alcohol crisis because of a similar system, the Unified State Automated Information System to account for the volume of production and turnover of ethyl alcohol, alcoholic products and products with a spirit content (EGAIS), which worked so badly that its operations were temporarily halted.

Last week the home page of the Yandex Blog Search was significantly updated, with the appearance of various ratings and even a tag cloud. Head of the company’s communications services department Roman Ivanov gave details in a Webplanet interview: what the Yandex system really consider to be blogs, what percentage of the blogosphere is closed for indexing, how entries are sorted by subject ratings, is there a danger of spam blogs and how to make money on blog hostings.