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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

After the announcement that the Sup.ru project had purchased the licence from Six Apart to support the Russian-language part of LiveJournal.com, radical blogger Mithgol announced the closure of its LiveJournal blog and the switch to FIDO because it has no wish "to work for hooknose jews".

Other users have set up a number of hate-communities (no_sup, anti_sup, new_albanians and others). Protest measures include flash mobs, letters of complaint to Brad-the-Founder (Fitzpatrick) and other means. Sup representatives have already explained that there will be neither a physical nor a judicial transfer of blogs to Russia.

However, at the same time Sup CBO Anton Nosik remarked in his personal blog that the percentage of "bastard protestors" can be disregarded when compared with the total volume of Russian-language LJ bloggers (698,000). After this it was not only the nationalists that joined the protest. According to the results of a poll, in which over 8,000 LJ users took part, the majority (51%) view the Sup – Six Apart deal negatively, with only 9% rating it positively (the rest remaining undecided). It is clear that Sup PR managers are responsible for such a negative reaction; they boasted much about the deal, but failed to show any kind of benefit for the simple users.

Last week PayPal partially opened the door to the countries of the former Soviet Union. In particular, it is now possible to pay for purchases on the eBay auction site. "Computerra" columnist Sergey Golubitsky, though, is inclined to criticize: "Why is PayPal needed, when there is WebMoney? There is our own MoneyMail, which is 10 times more convenient than PayPal".

Sergey Mikheev from the FINAM holding, which owns the MoneyMail system, also believes that, "it is unlikely that PayPal will quickly become a fully-fledged member of the Russian market". Representatives from the WebMoney and YandexMoney payment systems agree, commenting on the multitude of shortcomings with the American system. Russians are not afraid of the arrival of the eBay auction site either: Anna Artamonova, Vice President of Mail.ru, which owns the Russian Internet auction Molotok.ru, believes that no one will threaten the absolute leadership of Molotok on the local market.

The company PROMT and its American partner Smart Link Corporation announce the connection of the online translator ImTranslator, based on the PROMT translation server, to the AOL search portal. Now, thanks to ImTranslator's centralized service, users will not need to search a word to translate on one website, check the spelling on another and translate it on a third. This is not the first instance that the Americans have rated the quality of the PROMT system. In autumn 2005 NASA installed PROMT electronic translators on board the International Space Station and on astronauts’ pocket computers.

The major payment systems Visa and MasterCard have forbidden their partners from taking payments from clients of the Allofmp3.com website, which the American authorities have accused of illegally distributing music. However, managers of the website declared yesterday at an on-line conference that their company abides by Russian law, pays its taxes and pays what is due to the authors. So the claims of the Americans have a greater relation to Russian laws, while the accusations directed at Allofmp3.com are merely a way to get more concessions from Russia before entering the WTO. Nevertheless, when attempting to pay for music on Allofmp3.com with a credit card, a message appears, telling you that this credit card payment is not accessible.

According to a new report by Kaspersky Laboratories the total volume of spam in September remained the same, at 70-80% of all messages transmitted by mail servers. The number of messages on the subject of "personal finance" rose from 7.1% to 13.7%. The major bulk of the "financial spam" for September was comprised of messages inviting the recipient to invest money. At that, not a single message of this kind came in Russian. Last month spammers also continued to use August's technology novelty – spam in the format of an animated GIF file. Technically speaking, it is pretty hard to combat such messages, and it is they, believe Kaspersky’s specialists, that create the biggest headaches.