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The publishing house offers visitors of its website several dozen casual games developed by the company . Most of them are a variety arcades and puzzles. The games may be downloaded from the website for free but with only 30 minutes of playing time, after which they have to be registered. The games cost $4-6 apiece. Representatives of the magazine website say that this innovation is a necessity: "Most of our readers are successful women who sometimes, at the peak of the workday, simply need a minute to relax and recharge". In the future, Independent Media plans to sell games on the websites of its other publications - and .
On December 13, the police converged on the offices of the companies , and in vehicles marked as "special purpose police units" and started searching the buildings. Employees arriving for work were not allowed access to their workplaces while those already at work were ordered not to turn off their workstations or leave the corporate premises without prior notice. One of the versions of what provoked the search is the companies' alleged involvement in corruption schemes that enabled the and to skim interest off deals with integrators.
Nikolai Senkevich, CEO of , which is owned by the natural gas powerhouse , has said that his publishing holding needs to supplement its assets with Internet media and outdoor advertising business to be able to offer its clients a full range of advertising services. Still, creating an Internet resource of its own is seemingly not an option for Gazprom-Media, which is long accustomed to acquiring existing profitable assets. However, in the Russian segment of the Internet there are currently almost no major media outlets which would not be already owned by the large holding company. The company may still acquire . The irony of it would be that the website was launched by the Russian television channel NTV, which now also belongs to Gazprom (except its news website Newsru.com).
The company has bought the Greek Internet service provider , which has the third largest share of Greece's ISP market. Comstar reportedly forked over some 48 million euros for a 51-percent stake in the company. HoL presently serves 12 percent of the country's broadband users. The ISP has a total of 35,000 ADSL subscribers and 70,000 dialup subscribers. Comstar CEO Erik Franke primarily intends to integrate HoL into Comstar and conduct rebranding of its services and product offers.
By the end of this year investors will channel $5 million into the company (pronounced "soup"), which specializes in social media in Russian segment of the Internet. Sup CEO Andrew Paulson believes the company's value will reach ten times this amount by this time. The key Sup investor Aleksandr Mamut has not set spending limitis for SUP to acquire assets, so money is not the main factor in Paulson's decisions to buy new projects. Sup plans to create a network of new websites so that users could use a single login and password to enter the bunch of services. Sup also plans to buy an advertising agency as the company is too tied up to create one of its own from scratch.
Russian Deputy Minister for Communications Boris Antoniuk said the tender for licenses to provide third-generation (3G) communication services will be open to cellular operators and wireline service providers alike, as well as to investors without a history of investments in the telecom business. As he put it, the main criterion for selecting the successful bidders will be the extent to which their bids comply with the key tender terms. Three 3G service licenses will be offered by tender in the immediate future. The date has not been announced yet. However, Minister for Communications Leonid Reiman said previously that Russia would have a functioning G3 network by summer 2007.
The website devoted to the ongoing construction of in Grozny now features live web feeds from the construction site. Some of the web cameras also transmit audio, making it possible to get an earful of the colorful Chechen speech. Video is available only to web surfers who use Internet Explorer. On the bright side, it is possible to zoom in and magnify the image by up to four times. Some of the cameras also capture audio.
Representatives of the and the have recently met in St. Petersburg to sign an agreement on participation in the World Digital Library. The goals of the World Digital Library involve gathering and digitizing books, manuscripts, photographs and sound recordings relating to the cultures of various nations and ethnic groups. The first phase of the library project, estimated at $3,000,000, involves planning and development of a prototype website. This money will be provided by the owner of the Google search engine, and the first phase will span the entire 2007 year. The joint project of Google and the Library of Congress has found both proponents and opponents. For example, the nonprofit organization has launched its own project to digitize all of the world's books. Such an important mission cannot be entrusted to corporations, the organization believes.
Some 600,000 Russians are addicted to computer games, spending between 20 and 50 hours weekly glued to computer screens. Natalia Markova, director of the Communicative Research Center at the Russian Academy of Sciences and expert with the Federation Council, released such data in her report presented at a recent session of the Public Chamber for Culture Development. "This means that such people are basically lost to society. Their health is undermined, they are unable to start a family. Eventually they drop out of the demographic process," she said. Such words are essentially a verdict to gamers. It will be recalled that similar legislative initiatives have been put forward in neighboring Ukraine. The Russian Ministry of Education has already announced that it is drafting a bill that would introduce mandatory ratings for games depending on the level of their cruelty.
has published the second part of its report entitled "", which focuses on attacks on organizations. According to Kaspersky Lab, in the first six months of 2006 a total of 602 organizations suffered from attacks designed to steal clients' money, up by 14 percent from the same period the previous year. Cyber criminals who attack companies are increasingly after personal details of clients: e-mail addresses, social security numbers, credentials used to access online games, and PIN codes. In Russia criminals break into databases of tax and customs authorities, road traffic police, passport services, and communication operators. There are also programs attacking clients of several payment systems at the same time, such as , which targets users of PayPal, Сaixbank, Postbank and other systems.
