There was no Internet access and no national telephone connection in Severodvinsk and certain other population centres in the Archangelsk Region for about a day after optical fibre cable was taken in Archangelsk. Computer clubs were the first to notice the network interruptions, while the Severodvinsk branch of the Moscow Industrial Bank performed no client operations for the whole of 19 October. The Archangelsk branch of Northwest Telecom (Artelecom) is the only operator arranging the "last mile" to Internet users over the entire region. The number of Artelecom-Internet subscribers exceeds 65,000.

The Kommersant publishing house has opened a SmartEdition-version of its publications, developed at R Story – the Russian "daughter" of the Canadian company NewspaperDirect. The service enables one to read the edition on the date of publication in the same format that as the paper itself, work with issues in PressReader, work with Search, bookmarks, and SmartNavigation viewing options, and automatically translate articles into English, German, French and Spanish. The RSS subscription catalogue for Kommersant already contains Yahoo, Google and NewsGator aggregators. During the test period users will be given free access to all Smart Edition functions and the Kommersant archive for the last 30 days. It is too early to judge the commercial prospects of SmartEdition, although the NewspaperDirect technology is now already used by three respected publications (also including Vedomosti and Gazeta).

The Rambler search engine will soon be showing free ads from the popular paper Iz ruk v ruki ("From hand to hand") that correspond with each visitor’s query. Unlike Yandex, that takes stores and shoppers through YandexMarket, the Rambler search will link private trader to private trader. True, the Rambler search, even without newspaper ads, is covered in contextual advertising, like toys round a Christmas tree; in addition to the Begun ads and the finds on Rambler.Pokupki (Shopping), the display contains links to Price.ru, where you can find what you need, only a little cheaper.

A meeting of the State Committee for Radio Frequencies was held recently, linked with the development of 3G, third generation cellular communications. These networks were demonstrated in Moscow back in 2002. Head of the Ministry for IT and Communications Leonid Reiman promised that licences would be issued to operators in 2004 if the equipment for the 3G networks were accessible.

A representative from the operator Megafon informed that the company is already prepared to operate on the new frequencies, but there are still no business plans for 3G. One of the reasons for this is that the Ministry of Defence does not want to issue licences to operators on the GSM frequency in the 1800MHz range and the frequencies for third-generation cellular communications equipment (1900-2200MHz). The military talks of a threat to national security, but experts believe that no such threat exists, because all military equipment could be “shifted” to other frequencies, as is already done the world over.

Direct investment fund Baring Vostok Capital Partners (BVCP) has become the owner of almost 100% of the shares in the Ozon.ru store. Baring Vostok representative Yakov Minevich confirmed the possibility that Ozon could be sold to a Western company, writes the Vedomosti newspaper. Finam financial expert Igor Veretennikov values the controlling interest in Ozon at $60-70m and the whole store at $70-80m. He assumes that in a year the Internet store will be worth twice this amount.

The founder of LiveJournal.com learned of the scandal in the .ru zone, but he could not answer the questions of the Russian users of LJ owing to having no interpreter. The body of Brad Fitzpatrick was brought to Russia last week to hold a PR event to mark the acquisition by Sup-Fabrik from SixApart of the rights to service the Russian-language users of LJ.

Upon his departure from Moscow, Fitzpatrick reported in his blog that he was charmed by Russia, particularly by the episode with Frank the Goat. The symbolism of this "goat hunt" story came to the founder of LiveJournal later, when he was informed of the massive negative reaction to the deal. Fitzpatrick agreed that the Sup press conference was pointless and he promised to answer all the questions put by the Russians. However, he still didn't find himself an interpreter. Same time, the management of Sup have published a Russian FAQ with the same inarticulate answers that were given at the press conference. Remember that Webplanet raised the matter of using the language barrier to inflate Internet bubbles.