На днях "Первый канал" оклеветал известное интернет-сообщество, показав сайт в передаче о мошенниках. Но никакой ошибки здесь нету. Телепередачи об Интернете могут существовать только в жанре "трэш". Тут чем глупей, тем лучше.

The Russian company Nival Interactive has found an investor ready to spend $20 million to acquire its Nival Online (NO) division and create a new online game. According to sources aware of the details of the deal, the investor is the owner of the Mail.ru portal. Nival Interactive was dealing with the development of the Heroes of Might and Magic V game for the French company Ubisoft Entertainment. In accordance with Finam evaluations, Nival Interactive earned $5 million in 2005 and over $10 million in the first seven months of 2006. The key developers of "Heroes" will work at Nival Online. In all the company plans to hire about 200 people by 2008. NO President Sergey Orlovsky estimates that in 2008 the number of online-players in Russia will be 4-7 million, who will spend about $8 a month just on payment for the time of the game.

The Corbina-TV website has launched the competition Miss-Grud 2006 [Miss Bust 2006]. By 10 November anyone can vote for an anonymous bust of a member of staff of the Corbina Telecom provider. Under the rules of the competition only adult employees of the telecom provider can take part; for those whose portfolio contains no nude pictures, the company arranges a photo-session at the office. Based on the results of the interactive voting, a top-five will be determined, and the winner of the title "Miss Grud 2006" will be sent on "an unforgettable week for two to one of the World’s most beautiful countries".

The online job search website SuperJob.ru, valued six years ago by its owners at $3,500 will bring in around $4 million in 2006, believes co-owner of the company Alexei Zakharov. The company is now waiting for investors who are ready to offer the opportunity to enter the European or world markets. Headhunter, another recruitment company, values the Russian Internet recruiting market at $10-15 million, but Zakharov is confident that SuperJob's turnover could top $50 million. The reason for this unanimous enthusiasm of headhunters is that American TMP Worldwide introduced Monster.com to the Russian market. It is true that at the moment Monster's Russian website just aggregates 60,000 Russian vacancies from SuperJob.ru, HeadHunter.ru, Joblist.ru and collects paid announcements.

On 30 October, the Prof-Media holding announced the acquisition of 48.8 percent of the shares in Rambler Media Limited and concluded an agreement on the acquisition of a further 6 percent after the approval of the Russian antimonopoly authority. The Prof-Media holding, controlled by Vladimir Potanin is one of the largest of Russia's media structures. It contains the publishing houses Afisha and Komsomolskaya Pravda, several FM radio stations, including Avtoradio, and the Central Partnership film company. Early last week Rambler sold its loss-making television division Rambler TV to Prof-Media for 23 million dollars. Prof-Media General Director Raphael Akopov declared that, as a strategic investor, Prof Media plans to take Rambler to a new level of development, including "the use of mergers and acquisitions".

On 29 October Dean of the Moscow State University Journalism Faculty Yasen Zassoursky celebrated his 77th birthday. The faculty's media-culture and communication laboratory, headed by the dean's grandson Ivan Zassoursky, presented Zassoursky Snr a very modern gift – his own blog, zassoursky.ru. The blog is interesting as it publishes not so much the usual "routine notes" associated with today's blogs, rather the childhood recollections of one of the oldest senior figures of MSU.

The company Web Interactive World has announced the signing of an agreement under which it will create a new private city in the Wizards World online game. The clients are a group of individuals to whom complete power in this city will be handed after its creation. The owners will be able to determine the circle of players they will admit to the city and they can create their own closed world for themselves alone. The cost of the development is not disclosed but it is unlikely to be less than the previous project of its kind, named Edemian, which set the buyers back some 28,000 dollars.

Last Friday, 27 October, the search giant Google announced the results of the Global Code Jam 2006 programmer competition, held in New York. First prize was awarded to the Russian Petr Mitrichev, fifth-grade student of the mechanics and mathematics faculty of the Moscow State University. Over 21,000 programmers from 100 countries took part in the competition. 100 made it to the final, representing 24 countries. 32 Russians found themselves in the top one hundred, far more than from any other country. In an interview with Webplanet.ru Mitrichev informed that he had been invited to work at Google but that he had turned them down for now, as he wants to complete his studies and has no plans for the present to work on search engines.