Comstar-United TeleSystems announced the commercial launch of Wi-Fi Internet in the Moscow subway. At present Comstar-UTS provides Wi-Fi services in the three heavily trafficked underground stations – “Okhotny’ Ryad”, “Teatral’naya” and “Ploschad’ Revolyutsii”. There are twenty one hot-spots covering an area of two square kilometers, which includes waiting halls, passages, escalators and entrance halls. Tunnels in between stations are not yet covered by this network. At this stage the network capacity allows the simultaneous access of 48 users at a speed of 128 Kbit/s. According to Comnews.ru, Comstar's underground Wi-Fi network at the moment includes 130 hot-spots. Earlier the provider announced it would have the subway network launched by the end of 2006 with 22 hot-spots allowing simultaneous access of 400 users. Further the company plans to cover all interchange stations in the Moscow metro and launch similar services in St. Petersburg, where the Wi-Fi network is already undergoing tests at two stations.

New technopark for software developers will be built by 2012 in Moscow suburb. Project planning starts this year. Technopark will occupy 2,150,000 m² near Glazgovo village and will provide jobs for 10,000 professionals. The budget on technopark's construction reaches 15,8 bln rubles. One fifth of that money provided by Russia's government, the rest is commercial investment. As we reported, last year the government also announced that by 2010 technoparks would appear near Moscow, St.Petersbourg, Tumen, Nizhniy Novgorod, Kaluga, Novosibirsk and in Tatarstan. Some of those projects have been already launched, like technopark in Petergoff (St.Petersbourg region). Foreign investors such as Boeing are very interested in this project.

Speaking to press at the opening of the Financial Supermarket expo last week, a represantative of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) claimed most online ads of financial products to be illegal. "They just can't put all the details of the offer into a banner or text ad, as required by the Federal Law On Advertising, she explained. Further on Mar,6 FAS officials said they plan to fully examine banks' advertising on the web on how it meets legal requirements. As we reported earlier, last year Russian financial business spent $11,3 mln on online advertising with 70% of this money spent by twenty banks.

State Duma deputy Viktor Alksnis has followed the trend and opened an account on LiveJournal.com. One of the well known Russian LJ-users Timofei Shevyakov ('tarlith' on LJ) posted a comment to deputy's blog swearing him with unprintable words. Alksnis reminded him about the legal responsibility for disrespect to a government representative but the flame grew even more obscene. Then Viktor Alksins continued posting disclaimers and publicly appealing to establish the law that would "protect authorities from being insulted on the Web". After all his LiveJournal account was hacked and later suspended. Now he posts about his campaign against Timofei Shevyakov on v-alksnis2.livejournal.com. He has also addressed Russia's General Prosecutor to sew his legal and political opponent (such direct queryis deputies' and some other government officials exclusive right). This case also attracts much attention considering average Russian web user anonymity. Although it has been used so far as a shield by those who go online for illegal abusive actions, the recent lawsuits shows government's growing interest to control the Internet sphere in Russia.

With new products of Kaspersky 6.0 pack in March Kaspersky Lab plans to increase its share in corporate security segment in Russia and to strengthen company's positions on developed markets in other countries. According to Kaspersky Lab CEO Natalia Kasperskaya the new concept considers protection of the whole corporate communication system including laptops and mobile devices. Still competitors doubt that Kaspersky Lab may expand into corporate segment which is annually growing 30-35%.

Russian financial business spent $11,3 mln on online advertising in 2006, according to MindShare Interaction (MI) report. This is 83% more than 2005 result and totals 6% share of the whole online advertising in Russia. 70% of this money spent by twenty banks and their segment on the web doubled in 2006. Four of those (Russian Standard Bank, VTB, Alfa-bank and Citibank) share 55% of total banking ad expends.

NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), a global ICT solution provider, and TransTeleCom (TTC), Russia’s backbone telecom operator, will jointly establish a 500 km high-capacity undersea fiber-optic cable "the Hokkaido-Sakhalin Cable System (HSCS)" that will transmit data at up to 640 Gigabits per second between Ishikari, Hokkaido in Japan and Nevelsk, Sakhalin in Russia, based on Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology. The project will be completed by the end of 2007.

Two companies will jointly invest $50 mln, according to RBC Daily. Boris Ovtchinnikov from J'son& Partners admits that the market of international transit is not open but NTT's part in the project may provide special conditions for traffic transit. The lack of that kind of partnership may be a problem for another Russian operator Summa Telecom which started to work on an undersea cable between mainland Russia, Sakhalin and Japan this year, too.

Software developer 1C to announce March 3 the foundation of a joint company 1C-Bitrix which would further "develop, support and promote Bitrix Site Manager software, and release new co-branded products". According to some reports 1C has acquired Bitrix. Some experts say this alliance might work only in Russia as far as integration with 1C is of little interest to Bitrix's foreign clients. Analysts say the cost of Bitrix increase tenfold in 2006 and reached about $5 mln.

Rambler Media Limited called an Extraordinary General Meeting for March 15 to consider the appointment of two new directors Vladimir A Pravdivy and Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper proposed by 55 pct shareholder PM Invest Company Ltd. According to AFXnews, shareholders will also be asked to approve the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers as auditors of the company for the fiscal year 2006 annual audit. Rambler said Alexander Rappaport and Vitaly Rudenko have signified their intentions to resign from the board of directors. Shareholders' interest for Afisha Industries acting CEO Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper might be connected to his enthusiasm about blogging craze which has become recently so popular among investors.

Russian blog hosting LiveInternet.ru (Li.ru) will offer behavioral targeting to its advertisers next month. At the moment, demographically targeted ads on LI.ru are available only. LI.ru owner German Klimenko says the new technology is now being tested. Supposedly his company will follow LiveJournal's Russian operator Sup's pricing which is selling banner ads for $12-14 per 1,000 views, while LI.ru is now offering the same for $1,5-3.