On November 18 the company WebMoney Transfer registered its three millionth WMID account. Starting with 2004, the number of registrations climbed into the millions, while the volume of money transfers through the system doubles each year. The past year has seen an increase in the number of WM currencies with the addition of the Belarusian ruble equivalent. In the near future the system will launch its own investment instrument.

By year's end residents of a neighborhood in Dneprodzerzhinsk, Ukraine, will be able to monitor their electricity usage via the Internet. The first residential building has been already connected to the system. Information about current meter readings and monthly electricity usage will be available to both consumers and dispatchers. This will eliminate the need for controllers to visit households and check meter readings. The experiment will end next year. Depending on the results, the program may be implemented in other areas of the region. It is believed that this accounting system will make it possible to automatically prepare electricity bills, ruling out any errors. The likelihood of the system's vulnerability to hacker attacks has not been discussed yet.

Bad couriers is a big problem for Russian Internet stores. Two years ago courier wages at Internet stores averaged $150 - $200 and now stand at $300. Wages of Divizion delivery service couriers start at $450, while Ozon.ru couriers rake in as much as $500 to $1,300. Nonetheless, many couriers steal, fail to show up for work, are rude to clients, and view their work as a stopgap job. Oftentimes companies seek to cut costs, hiring physically challenged or intellectually inferior individuals. Meanwhile, the Russian Internet commerce market grows at the annual pace of 50%, while for individual companies this figure is an impressive 100%. In most cases, delivery service workers are the only company representatives with whom clients have direct contact.

Charged with anti-Russian propaganda on the Web, Novosibirsk resident Taras Zeleniak, 31, faced a prison term of up to two years. Yesterday the court satisfied a motion by Zeleniak's lawyer Vladimir Melnikov to return the case for further investigation on the grounds that the accusation makes no references to any specific acts of wrongdoing. The criminal charges have been prompted by Zeleniak's comments posted at the www.proua.com forum. A linguistic examination has established that abuse of derogatory terms "katsap" and "moskal" fuels interethnic strife. Lawyer Melnikov insisted in court that a person may not be criminally prosecuted for one's "thoughts and feelings."

The Federal Tax Service plans to start implementing an electronic system to monitor the payment of taxes in real time. The automated tax administration system will monitor only those taxes which citizens pay themselves, namely the transport, land, and real estate taxes. Simultaneously with sending a payment order to a citizen, the system will automatically send its electronic copy to the bank where the database of future payments will be formed. As soon as the bank receives taxes, information will be electronically transmitted to the tax authorities. Despite the new system's obvious convenience, its economic effectiveness raises doubts. The taxes in question form a small percentage of budgetary receipts, while system administration costs may turn out significantly higher.

The St. Petersburg-based television broadcaster Liubimyi Gorod will develop websites for the city's schools. Funding for the project is expected to come from sponsors, who will receive eternal banner space in return. Liubimyi Gorod deputy general director Pavel Sadovnikov estimates that each project participant will get 1.5 million unique visitors each, drawing on the local population of school students and their parents. Liubimyi Gorod estimates the development cost of each website at 5,300 rubles (200 US dollars). The broadcaster has signed contracts for 10 websites and is in partnership talks with the hypermarket chain Lenta. The municipal education committee has readily endorsed the project, as only a quarter of the city's schools have websites.

This December the IT consulting company "Ashmanov and Partners", which specializes in Web search technologies, is releasing a book entitled Promoting a Website in Search Systems. Intended primarily for beginners in search optimization, the book will also come in handy for seasoned pros. The authors admit that fine-tuning websites for search engines is a necessity and insist that users must not be overlooked when resources are optimized.

The company Quintura, famous for its visual search system of the same name, will receive substantial investment from the venture funds Mangrove Capital Partners (Luxembourg), ABRT Venture Fund (St. Petersburg) and OpenView Venture Partners (Boston). Mangrove Capital Partners is one of the early Skype investors, and the upcoming investment in Quintura will be the first investment by Western venture funds in a Russian Internet company. In an interview with StartupSquad.com, Quintura CEO Yakov Sadchikov said: "We plan using the venture capital to take the Web by storm and reach millions of web users globally when launching the Quintura visual find engines for various user communities."

St. Petersburg State University rector Ludmila Verbitskaya and Russia's Minister for Information Technologies and Communications Leonid Reiman have recently met with the University's students to unveil plans for a real technology park in the vicinity of the University's facilities in Petergof. Five hectares of land outside the University's Mathematics and Mechanics Faculty has been earmarked for this purpose, but the estimated timeframe and funding for the technology park have yet to be approved. So far development is expected to start sometime in 2007. Much of the work to develop a construction strategy for the technology park will be handled by the company Tercom, whose president Prof. Andrei Terekhov is the chairman of the System Programming Department at the St. Petersburg State University. Major foreign companies, in particular Boeing, have expressed strong interest in building the technology park. A majority of skilled Petersburg-based IT specialists currently "work for the West", while local offices of foreign IT companies are often established on the premises of Russian universities.

The domain name registrar Ru-Center has recently held a public auction of the domain name Travels.ru, which started at $30 and fetched $4,000 after just three days. The famous Russian cybersquatter Pavel Gross believes that while domain name auctions are a much needed service, the Russian domain name market pales in comparison to that of the West, where countless similar marketplaces have evolved. On the other hand, the legal confusion in Russia creates more opportunities for cybersquatters. To quote Gross, who currently owns some 4,500 domain names, a Russian cybersquatter can net an average of $4,000 per month selling domain names and an additional $3,500 hosting advertisements on captured domains.