Last week, Yandex, one of biggest search and advertising companies in Russia, announced that it would be teaming up with Microsoft, Nokia, HTC and Samsung to become the default search engine on both new and upcoming Windows Phones in Russia. This followed the news last month that Yandex is also set to become the search provider for bada-powered smartphones in Russia and the CIS. It’s been a good last few months for Yandex, as Robin pointed out last week, the company has steadily grown its share of the Russian search market to a point where it now owns 62.7 percent of the market in Q3 2011 — ahead of Google.
Today, the Russian search giant has announced another strategic move in its mobile strategy, as it has acquired SPB Software, a developer of mobile software that makes its home in Russia, Taiwan, and Thailand. As for the price, sources close to the deal say that it was set at approximately $38 million. → Read More
Yandex, the Russian online search and advertising giant, has teamed up with Microsoft, Nokia, HTC and Samsung to become the default search engine on the latest – and upcoming – Windows Phone smartphones in Russia.
Yandex’s search engine is currently installed on Samsung’s Оmnia W, which is already on sale in Russia, as well as on Nokia’s Windows Phone-powered Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 smartphones, which will hit stores in December. → Read More
Russian online search and advertising juggernaut Yandex this morning reported solid quarterly earnings, showing off increases in both revenues and net income, compared to 2010.
The company, which raised over $1.4 billion in a NASDAQ IPO earlier this year, reported revenues of RUR 5.2 billion ($161.9 million), up 65 percent compared with Q3 2010. → Read More
Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, has acquired startup venture The Tweeted Times, which enables people to create custom online ‘newspapers’ generated from their Twitter accounts. Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed, but Yandex says it aims to continue offering the social news service and that the entire The Tweeted Times team will be joining the search engine company.
The Tweeted Times was co-founded by Maxim Grinev and Maria Grineva, both computer scientists at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and others. → Read More
Bubble or not, 2011 may go down as the year of the tech IPO. Not since the last bubble have we seen so many technology companies clamoring to go public. And halfway through the year, we still have many more companies who will be listing on either the NASDAQ or the NYSE in the next six months. Here’s a roundup of the tech companies that have gone public, where they are trading now, and who we can expect to see ringing the bell next.
Professional social network LinkedIn probably had the biggest IPO in terms of hype this year because it was one of the first big social media companies to go public. After pricing its IPO at $45 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, LinkedIn began trading at $83.00 per share on May 19, giving the company a $7.8 billion market cap. In the first day of trading, shares popped up to as high as $122.70, soaring past a $10 billion valuation. → Read More
After pricing its IPO at $25 per share a few hours before the market opened, the Russian search giant’s share price jumped close to 40% immediately after its flotation.
The price per share opened this morning at $35, giving Yandex a market cap of roughly $11.2 billion at its debut. That means its value currently far surpasses that of LinkedIn, which went public last week (successfully, too). → Read More
Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, this morning announced the pricing of its initial public offering of a little under 52.2 million Class A ordinary shares at $25.00 per share.
The shares will begin trading later today on NASDAQ under the symbol “YNDX”.
The company is thus raising a little over $1.3 billion, and has granted its underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 5.2 million shares to cover over-allotments. → Read More
As we wrote last week, Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, filed for a public offering on NASDAQ under the symbol “YNDX”. Today, the company is announcing price range of the offering, which will be $20.00 to $22.00 per share. The company aims to raise as much as $1.2 billion from the sales of its shares, according to the filing.
Yandex proposes to sell 15,400,000 shares in the offering and certain of its shareholders propose to sell an aggregate of 36,774,088 shares. In addition, Yandex and the selling shareholders have granted the underwriters an option to purchase, in aggregate, up to an additional 5,217,405 shares to cover over-allotments, if any. The total amount of shares offered in the filing is 52,174,088 shares. → Read More
Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, this morning announced that it has filed a registration statement with the SEC for a proposed initial public offering, as expected. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have not yet been determined, but the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the company had been given a preliminary valuation of between $6 billion and $9 billion ahead of the filing.
According to the filing, the proposed maximum aggregate offering price amounts to $1 billion, which should give you an indication of how much Yandex seeks to raise. → Read More
Russian search engine Yandex has acquired Loginza, a local startup whose service allows developers to implement user authentication via the likes of Facebook, Twitter or OpenID-supported sites, without additional registration. Terms of the deal, which came about through Yandex’s “open days for startups”, an initiative as part of the Yandex.Start program, remain undisclosed.
As noted, Loginza’s single sign-in plugin supports authentication via Facebook and Twitter, along with Blogger, WordPress, VeriSign, AOL, Yahoo!, Flickr, Last.fm, LiveJournal, myOpenID and OpenID. It also supports authorization schemes of a number of Russian services: Yandex, Mail.Ru, Vkontakte, Rambler, WebMoney, Diary.ru and Loginza itself. → Read More
Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, has acquired WebVisor, a Russian startup, after holding an “open day for startups” to pitch the search company. WebVisor provides visitor behavior analysis (mouse movement, clicks, text copying etc.) and will be integrated with the company’s own visitor statistics tool, Yandex.Metrica. Terms were not disclosed.
Yandex says the WebVisor team has joined the company to work on merging their technology into its own framework. WebVisor will keep servicing existing clients, but the service will not accept new customers going forward. → Read More
Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine which is thought to be mulling over an IPO for up to $1.5 billion, is rolling out a new feature today that aims to make its search experience seem a lot more intelligent.
Dubbed “Spectrum” and claiming to be able to read users’ minds, it uses what sounds like a combination of semantic technology and machine learning to “infer implicit queries and return matching search results.” In other words, Spectrum is able to make better sense of the meaning of searches based on its own classification system.
It’s based on what Yandex describes as query statistics: → Read More
Yandex, the Russian juggernaut of a search engine that is thought to be considering an IPO for up to $1.5 billion, has partnered with VKontakte, which is the largest social network in Russia. How big? The so-called Facebook-clone accounts for more than half of web traffic in the CIS region.
Under the arrangement, the public-facing elements of VKontakte user profiles will show up in Yandex searches in realtime. So far, this has resulted in Yandex indexing over 25 million user profiles, essentially creating a people search engine since results, where publicly available, will link to and/or display a person’s date of birth, place of birth, university or place of work. → Read More
Yandex, Russia’s search engine leader and the nation’s largest Internet company, is reportedly considering a flotation that would raise around £1 billion or $1.56 billion for the firm, thisismoney reports, citing City sources. The company is said to be mulling a listing in London early next year, although it could still end up picking NASDAQ.
The IPO would follow in the footsteps of fellow Russian Internet giant Mail.ru’s successful listing – the company raised roughly $1 billion. → Read More
Yandex, operator of Russia’s largest search engine, has invested in Tel-Aviv based facial recognition technology startup Face.com, marking its first investment in an Israeli company. In total, Face.com has raised $4.3 million in Series B funding in a round led by previous investor Rhodium.
The news was first reported by TheMarker (in Hebrew) but we’ve confirmed the news with a Yandex representative, who declined to say how much it is investing in the startup. → Read More
Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine, has beefed up its music streaming options with the launch of the Yandex.Music service.
In addition to single tracks previously available for streaming directly on yandex.ru, where available, users who search for a particular track, album or artist will be re-directed to Yandex.Music in which they can make their own playlists or further search for music by style or genre etc.
In terms of restrictions, the service allows users to add both tracks and entire albums to playlists and stream an unlimited amount of music for free, perhaps reflecting the prevalence of the ‘grey’ market in Russia. → Read More
Russian search engine Yandex is now allowing users to limit search to only foreign websites (non Russian sites). Now users can click on the global search filter (as shown in this screenshot) to see results from foreign sources. The global search is also available at the company’s experimental Yandex.com portal launched for testing new search algorithms.
Yandex has been indexing foreign websites and adding global content to its search results for the past two years and caters towards Russian users, obviously. But the feature will allow a users to filter results more accurately if they want an answer from a website outside of Russia. → Read More
Yandex is one of few national non-English language search engines that have managed to outrun the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in their countries, in this case Russia.
Yandex was first to market in Russia – it made its debut in 1997 – and has since established itself as the undisputed leader in search with an estimated domestic market share of 58% according to LiveInternet.ru. At number two we find Google, which trails far behind at 23% despite a recent search partnership with Mail.ru, the third horse in this race.
But rather than building a browser of its own, Yandex has apparently opted to develop a custom iteration of Google’s Chrome browser based on the Chromium open source project. → Read More
Earlier this month, we reported that Google would be replacing Russian search leader Yandex as the default search engine and ad server on Mail.ru, the most popular online destination in the country with more than 50 million unique monthly users.
This morning, Mail.ru confirmed (in Russian) that it will be replacing Yandex with Google as its default search provider starting January 2010. → Read More
It’s all over the news in Russia this morning: Mail.ru, the leading Internet portal in the country, will reportedly be replacing Russian search king Yandex as its default search provider and hand over the keys to Google again.
While nothing has been official confirmed by either party yet, the information comes from solid sources, according to multiple publications. → Read More
