Yandex, according to some speculation, may be in line to become the default search engine on devices that Apple sells in Russia. But for now it’s engaging in a little competition with Cupertino, and others. Today the Russian search giant is launching its own answer to iCloud: a free, web-based storage product it’s calling Yandex.Disk.

Users of Yandex.Disk get up to 10 gigabytes of space that they can use for personal documents, photos, music and videos. Like iCloud and Microsoft’s Skydrive, the service is aimed specifically at offering storage services that help keep users tied in to the rest of Yandex’s portfolio of products. Once uploaded to Disk, the files can subsequently be accessed from any internet-enabled device.

Like the integration that we’ve seen from attachments.me to automatically save email attachments to services like Dropbox and Box, Yandex.Disk also automatically saves email attachments from users’ Yandex.Mail accounts — a service that is on top of that 10GB allowance. Yandex says it will be adding more of its own services to that list in future.

Disk is currently invitation-only for those who are registered with Yandex. And it could be that Yandex is using the new service to grow those ranks.

Yandex controls more than 60 percent of the search market, as of February 2012, and had 45 million unique visitors to its sites in December 2011. But when it comes to registered users it looks like the numbers are significantly lower. Yandex says that Mail is the second-most-popular service after search. But as of February 2012, that translated to only 11.6 million weekly users of its Mail service (so under a third of the number using its search product). That doesn’t reflect a potential Disk audience 100 percent, since some people do not login when they use Yandex, the spokesperson said. “But I suppose they probably will when they know about Disk…as Disk is closely integrated with Mail,” he added.

Having registered users that you can cross sell services like Mail, Maps and other products, of course, makes that person much more valuable for Yandex and potential advertisers, the basis of Yandex’s business model.

There is another reason it is important for Yandex to have launched this service: offering digital lockers and cloud storage services have also become almost like table stakes for big companies that want to build businesses out of distributing other kinds of cloud-based content (see HTC’s own Dropbox deal), and the same goes here for Yandex.

In the Russian’s case, in addition to products like its email service, it also has Yandex.Music. This is a free streaming service that Yandex offers in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan that covers some three million tracks and has 2.8 million monthly unique users.

Yandex tells me that for now, Disk, designed with a Russian interface, is being marketed specifically in Russia and other Russian-speaking markets; there are no stated plans at the moment to extend that, although Yandex has done that with other products in its portfolio (such as search), so you never know.

In addition to being accessible via a web interface across different platforms, Yandex.Disk will also work via a Windows or MacOS GUI client, as well as via the Yandex.Mail app available for iPhone and Android devices.

There has been some speculation that Yandex and Apple might link up, as part of a larger strategy from Apple to offer integration with local leaders in certain big markets outside the U.S. So far, Apple has integrated a lot of Chinese services, for example, into its latest Mac OS, Mountain Lion. And Yandex has inked similar deals to be the default search client on Samsung’s bada devices in the CIS region as well as Windows Phone 7 devices in Russia.

Some believe that this will extend to China’s search leader Baidu becoming the default search engine on iOS devices as well, something that has yet to be confirmed. Yandex also would not comment on the question of whether it would do the same for iOS in Russia.

More news from Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, that highlights the opportunity for more growth in digital in Russia and adjacent markets. One day after announcing a new real-time search partnership with Twitter, the company is reporting Q4 earnings: sales were at $200 million with net income of $71.3 million, both representing growth respectively of 56 percent and 51 percent on the same quarter a year ago.

But although Yandex says the figures were at the high end of its guidance, revenues fell short of average analyst expectations of $207.6 million, as polled by Yahoo Finance.

Yandex noted that its share of the Russian search market is now at 60.8 percent, according to LiveInternet. That still makes it the biggest search portal in Russia, although this represents a decline over last quarter, when the company reported a 62.7 percent share of the market.

That underscores Yandex’s move to search for new platforms and mediums, and markets, to serve ads.

Those include services like adding Twitter’s real-time search. But also, like its rival Google, Yandex is putting a lot of effort into its mobile business, and has in the last several months inked search deals with Samsung for its bada devices and Microsoft for Windows Phone — where Yandex will now become the default search window for the CIS and Russia, respectively.

It has also bought its own mobile developer, SPB Software, for a price believed to be around $38 million. SPB has developed mobile payment services, games, and other mobile apps. It’s probably a big leap to think that Yandex will go the whole hog and look at making its own mobile OS, as Google has done with Android (although never discount the possibility). But in any case, SPB already works in enough areas where Yandex could potentially insert ads and power other functions, for its own services and those for third parties.

The company is also expanding outside of its traditional base of Russia and the CIS: it has launched new services like maps in Turkey, where it is currently making a big push.

While those efforts have yet to bear significant fruit for Yandex — at least not enough worth mentioning in today’s results — the company continues to see growth in its existing online advertising business:

Search engine result pages were up 36 percent from last year; and advertisers now number 173,000 – a 43 percent increase over last year – and 10 percent up on Q3. For the full year, advertisers were up by 44 percent to 270,000. The bulk of Yandex’s ad revenues are coming from its own search-based text ads, which account for 68 percent of Yandex’s revenues. But just in terms of actual growth, revenues from third-party sites actually saw bigger gains last quarter. Text based ads altogether accounted for over 80 percent of Yandex’s revenues:

Yandex said it expects that overall, Ruble-based revenue growth for 2012 will be in the range of 40-45 percent.

A significant step for Twitter in its international growth: Yandex, Russia’s search giant, today announced that it will carry Twitter data in all of its search results.

The news also underscores one possible route to revenue generation for Twitter: Yandex describes this as a licensing deal. The terms of it were not disclosed but Microsoft reportedly paid Twitter $30 million for a similar search agreement.

The agreement with Yandex will see Twitter’s data firehose appear both in Yandex’s blog search, as well as through a dedicated URL, twitter.yandex.ru.

The Yandex agreement is similar to the real-time Twitter search that used to be offered by Google — a partnership that ended last year around the time that Google was launching its own Google+ service.

Yandex says it has licensed the “full feed of all public tweets,” covering all languages — but seems to highlight specifically those tweets that are in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, covering tweets from more than two million users. People will be able to search by usernames and hashtags, too. In total, Twitter has around 100 million active users, covering some 250 million tweets per day.

This looks like Twitter’s first big deal with a Russian portal, and could point to more local partnerships of its kind — useful for Twitter extending its coverage and usefulness beyond its home market and English.

For Yandex, the Twitter deal gives the search giant — which currently has around 60 percent of the market in Russia — a leg up in its own strategy to do more in social networking: Yandex already offers people Google-like features to share news and other content and this will enhance that.

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.

SPB was founded in 1999 and was originally focused on making applications and software for Android and Windows mobile devices, from games to productivity apps, but has since become cross-platform, and today offers a more robust suite of mobile solutions. These products include a mobile wallet, data traffic analytics, games, web TV integration, a mobile UI builder, etc.

But, according to Yandex Spokesman Ochir Mandzhikov, what was particularly of interest was the company’s new mobile UI engine for both smartphones and tablets, especially SPB’s “Shell 3D” product, which will be used to integrate Yandex’s cloud services and technologies. This is an important play for Yandex because it allows the company to integrate their search and ad services into a UI which can then be distributed across a multitude of mobile platforms. What’s more, using SPB’s mobile UI builder and toolset, OEMS and brands can customize skins, layout, widgets and 3D animation.

For more on SPB, visit them at home, and for more on SPB Shell 3D, check out the video below:

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.

Following the launch of Windows Phone-based Titan, Mozart and Radar smartphones last autumn, HTC is also planning an update release with Yandex as the default search engine on its handsets.

The news comes on the heels of the announcement last month that Yandex became the main search provider on bada-powered smartphones available in Russia and the CIS.

Yandex points out it has already developed some apps for Windows Phone, including mapping service Yandex.Maps and online marketplace Yandex.Market, and that it will build more applications for the platform and other mobile operating systems in the future.

According to LiveInternet data, Yandex’s share of the Russian search market averaged 62.7 percent in Q3 2011, trumping Google by a margin. The company, which raised over $1.4 billion in a NASDAQ IPO earlier this year, recently reported revenues of RUR 5.2 billion ($161.9 million) for the third quarter of this year, up 65 percent compared with Q3 2010.

Aside from Russia, Yandex also operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkey.

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.

Net income jumped 93 percent to RUR 1.7 billion ($53.5 million) compared to the third quarter of 2010, beating forecasts.

According to LiveInternet data, Yandex’s share of the Russian search market averaged 62.7 percent in Q3 2011, trumping Google by a margin. The company also reports that its number of advertisers have increased by more than 48 percent compared to Q3 2010, clocking in at over 158,000.

Yandex recently acquired a social news startup called The Tweeted Times and put up half of a $30 million funding round for alternative search engine Blekko.

The company’s price per share is $25.79 before market open, giving Yandex a market cap of roughly $8.3 billion.

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.

Its users include celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Alyssa Milano and Lance Weiler.

Yandex, which went public last May and is currently valued at just shy of $10 billion, plans to use technologies acquired from The Tweeted Times to boost its search and content services with information from social networks.

This is the third company Yandex has acquired in the past nine months – its most recent purchases include single sign-in plugin maker Loginza and WebVisor’s behavior analysis technology and team.

The Tweeted Times, formerly called Twitter Times, competes with social news curation service Paper.li, which has itself raised over $2 million in financing.

Another company operating in this space is Summify.

LINKEDIN (NYSE:LNKD)

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.

But these high stock prices didn’t sustain and LinkedIn’s value per share dropped significantly over the next month, dropping as low as $63.71 per share. However, the company’s stock rebounded last week, with shares rising as high as $95.50 on Friday, eventually closing at $94.54. That’s a 110 percent increase from its initial pricing.

PANDORA (NYSE:P)

Similar to LinkedIn, music streaming service Pandora also drew considerable attention to its IPO, which debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the desirable, single character symbol ‘P.’ The company priced its IPO at $16 per share (valuing the company at $2.6 billion), but opened at $20 per share on June 15 (up 25 percent), valuing the company at $3.2 billion.

In the two weeks following the IPO, Pandora’s stock took a bit of a dive, reaching as low as $12.16 per share. But like LinkedIn, Pandora’s shares saw an uptick over the past week, closing at $20.04 on Friday, which is up 25 percent from the company’s initial pricing in June.

YANDEX (NASDAQ:YNDX)

Russian search engine Yandex, which began trading on the NASDAQ on May 24, priced its IPO at $25 per share, but opened at $35, giving Yandex a market cap of roughly $11.2 billion. That’s a bigger market cap than both LinkedIn and Pandora.

Yandex has experienced highs and lows in the past month with the value of its stock, but the fluctuations have not been nearly as extreme as some of its contemporaries in the tech IPO market. Yandex’s stock dipped to a low of $29.73 in mid-June but rebounded quickly and closed on Friday at $35.69, which is a 40 percent increase from its initial pricing.

FUSION-IO (NYSE:FIO)

Fusion-io, the developer of flash- memory technology for companies, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on June 9. The company priced its IPO at $19 per share, valuing Fusion-io at $1.5 billion, but opened at $25 per share, giving the company a nearly $2 billion market cap.

Fusion-io’s stock has performed fairly well over the past month, reaching a high of $36.32 last week. The company’s shares closed at $31.19 on Friday, up 64 percent from its initial pricing.

HOMEAWAY (NASDAQ:AWAY)

Vacation home rental service HomeAway debuted its IPO last week, pricing at $27 per share. HomeAway, which listed on the NASDAQ, saw its shares pop over 30 percent in initial trading last Wednesday, giving the rental service as valuation of $3 billion.

HomeAway’s shares have maintained its value, relatively speaking, in its first week of trading, reaching a low of $34.92 and a high of $42.30. On Friday, HomeAway’s shares closed at $38.42, a 42 percent increase from the stock’s pricing.

RENREN (NYSE:RENN)

Chinese social network Renren actually went public before LinkedIn, pricing its IPO in early May at $14 per share, with a total offering size of $743.4 million. The company was pitching itself as a “Facebook” like site for the Chinese market, which resulted in an increase in the share price range from the initial $9-$11 to $12-$14. That increase resulted in a boost in the deal size to $743.4 million from the original price of $584 million.

RenRen opened at $18 per share, but the stock has since plummeted to as low as $6.23 per share. On Friday, RenRen closed at $9.25 per share, which is a 34 percent drop in value from the initial pricing.

BANKRATE (NYSE:RATE)

Bankrate provides free rate information to consumers on more than 300 financial products, including mortgages, credit cards, new and used automobile loans, and more. The company priced its IPO at $15 per share, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. The company’s shares, which began trading in mid-June, have remained fairly steady at this price, reaching a high of $17.89. Bankrate closed at $17.13 per share on Friday, up 13 percent.

Who’s Next Up To IPO

Zillow: Real estate listings giant Zillow filed its S-1 in April, so we could be seeing the company hit the public markets in the next two months. Zillow wants to raise $51.75 million in the offering, and while revenue has grown for the company year over year, Zillow has taked a loss for the past three years. Zillow will trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol “Z.”

Kayak: Travel search engine Kayak filed its S-1 last November, aiming to raise $50 million. No word on when the search engine is planning to IPO, but Kayak did reveal revenue growth in the past year, however net income is down. The company will trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol “KYAK.”

Groupon: Daily deals giant Groupon just filed its S-1 in June, aiming to raise $750 million in the public offering. Though the company has an impressive revenue run rate of $2.6 billion for 2011, but has drawn criticism for a lack of profits and the fact that the founders have taken a significant amount of money off the table. The company is looking at an IPO in the Fall.

Zynga: Zynga just filed for its $1 billion IPO this past Friday, revealing impressive financials. Revenues grew 392 percent in 2010, up from $121.5 million in 2009. In the first quarter of 2011 alone, the company’s revenues reached $235 million (or a $940 million revenue run-rate), which is up 134 percent from the first quarter of 2010. Both Zynga and Groupon may be rushing to IPO ahead of Facebook, which is expected to file in the coming year.

Not Yet Filed, But Champing At The Bit:

Facebook: We know an IPO is in the works for Facebook, it’s just a matter of when. The company has been meeting with bankers to discuss IPO size and time frame for an offering. And the company just added Netflix founder and CEO (and an IPO veteran) Reed Hastings to its board. It’s been thought that the social network will go public by April 2012, but it could happen before this date.

Glam Media: We’ve heard Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is planning to file for an IPO as early as this Fall. The company has hit $100 million in annual revenue, reaches 90 million people a month in the U.S., and is in the process of hiring bankers to lead its offering.

Yelp: Online reviews and daily deals giant Yelp has its sights set on an IPO, but the timeline is unclear. Yelp is now at 50 million unique visitors per month, mostly in the U.S., and has raised $56 million in funding.

Disclosure: My husband is an employee of Groupon.

Users get full access to emails from their Yandex.Mail account, along with an IM feature and camera integration so that they take and send a photo all without leaving the iOS app. In addition, there’s support for external personal email accounts and a nifty location feature.

The app is “always ready with an answer to the ‘where are you?’ question”, says Anton Zabannykh, head of networking services at Yandex. This is delivered via a ‘Locate me’ option, which automatically creates a link to a Yandex map with the user’s current location, which can be instantly emailed from the phone. It’s another example of the integrated approach that Yandex can deliver given it’s Google-like array of consumer-facing web services.

Yandex.Mail’s iPhone app joins existing offerings for competing mobile platforms: Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Java.

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).

As Reuters remarked earlier this morning, an IPO at $25 per share would have already valued Yandex at more than 500 times its worth (!) when investors bought into the company back in 2000. Let the “is this a big, medium or small tech bubble” debates begin.

For the sake of comparison, LinkedIn was valued at $7.8 billion when it went public, and boasted a market cap of roughly $8.17 billion when the markets opened this morning.

Yandex, founded in 1997, today operates the most popular search engine and the most visited website in Russia (it is also the largest Russian Internet company by revenue). In 2010, the company generated 64% of all search traffic in Russian, trumping Google.

Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia, with an estimated workforce of about 2,500 employees. Currently, Yandex has branches all over Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kazan), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the United States (in Palo Alto, CA, to be exact).

Today, the company joins the likes of Baidu, Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Apple on the NASDAQ stock market. We’ll see how it fares.

We’ll keep tracking Yandex’s share price throughout the day (and beyond, evidently).

(Photos below via freeerror on img.ly and dest1k on yfrog)

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 offering would give Yandex a market cap of roughly $8 billion.

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 eventual over-allotments. Earlier this month, Yandex had priced its IPO at $20 to $22 per share.

LinkedIn, which went public last week, had also increased the price per share right before.

Yandex is selling 15.4 million shares (pocketing $385 million), while some of its shareholders are selling an aggregate of roughly 36.8 million shares ($920 million).

Yandex operates the most popular search engine and the most visited website in Russia (it is also the largest Russian Internet company by revenue). In 2010, the company generated 64% of all search traffic in Russian, trumping Google.

In March 2011, Yandex.ru website attracted 38.3 million unique visitors. Aside from Russia, Yandex has operations in Belarus (yandex.by), Kazakhstan (yandex.kz) and Ukraine (yandex.ua). Total revenues for 2010 hovered around $440 million.

Founded back in 1997, Yandex has been reported to be preparing an IPO before, with talks dating back all the way to 2006. In 2008, the company planned for an initial public offering but quickly moved to indefinitely delay those plans due to the global economic turmoil.

Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia, with an estimated workforce of about 2,500 employees. Currently, Yandex has branches all over Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kazan), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the United States (in Palo Alto, CA, to be exact).

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.

Basically what this means is that $1.3 billion worth of shares will be sold, with as much as $338 million (at $22 per share) from the IPO going to Yandex and the rest going to the shareholders who sold stock.

Yandex operates the most popular search engine and the most visited website in Russia (it is also the largest Russian Internet company by revenue). In 2010, the company generated 64% of all search traffic in Russian, trumping Google. In March 2011, Yandex.ru website attracted 38.3 million unique visitors. Aside from Russia, Yandex has operations in Belarus (yandex.by), Kazakhstan (yandex.kz) and Ukraine (yandex.ua). Total revenues for 2010 hovered around $440 million. The company says that in the past three years, Yandex generated more than 97% of its revenues from advertising.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the company had been given a preliminary valuation of between $6 billion and $9 billion.

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.

A portion of the shares will be issued by Yandex, and a portion will be sold by certain of its shareholders. Yandex will list its Class A ordinary shares on NASDAQ (symbol: “YNDX”).

Yandex operates the most popular search engine and the most visited website in Russia (it is also the largest Russian Internet company by revenue). In 2010, the company generated 64% of all search traffic in Russian, trumping Google.

In March 2011, Yandex.ru website attracted 38.3 million unique visitors. Aside from Russia, Yandex has operations in Belarus (yandex.by), Kazakhstan (yandex.kz) and Ukraine (yandex.ua). Total revenues for 2010 hovered around $440 million.

Based on the filing, net income for 2010 was $134 million.

Founded back in 1997, Yandex has been reported to be preparing an IPO before, with talks dating back all the way to 2006. In 2008, the company planned for an initial public offering but quickly moved to indefinitely delay those plans due to the global economic turmoil.

Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia, with an estimated workforce of about 2,500 employees. Currently, Yandex has branches all over Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kazan), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the United States (in Palo Alto, CA, to be exact).

Morgan Stanley is acting as sole global coordinator for the proposed offering. Deutsche Bank Securities and Goldman Sachs are acting as joint bookrunners.

The SEC filing follows in the footsteps of fellow Russian Internet giant Mail.ru’s successful listing – the company raised roughly $1 billion at the end of last year.

Also read:

Russian search giant Yandex partners with local Facebook-clone VKontakte
Russian search engine Yandex gets a semantic injection
Yandex acquires WebVisor’s behavior analysis technology, team
Yandex acquires Loginza, the single sign-in plugin maker

Yandex IPO to Make Dozens of Yandex Employees Millionaires (Quintura blog)

The first digital map built in-house is a detailed map of Moscow and the Moscow region. It shows two times as many buildings as its previous editions, while users can see recently built apartment buildings and shopping malls because the data is very up to date. Overall, the new map of Moscow and the Moscow region includes 204 detailed maps of towns and small communities, says the company.

But most of all, Yandex is talking up its ability to keep its maps updated and therefore more accurate now that it has full control. Because its maps are proprietary rather than being bought from a third-party, the company says it is able to make changes or improvements as frequently as necessary, thus keeping the maps constantly updated.

Additionally, users are invited to help too by sending their suggestions via a feedback form. It hopes that the more user feedback the Yandex mapmakers receive, the more accurate the maps will be.

The new map is available online at maps.yandex.ru or on mobile as the Yandex.Maps application.

The Yandex.Factory will invest “up to hundreds of thousands US dollars” in startups from Russia, the CIS region or, basically, anywhere that have demonstrated potential in their seed or early investment stage.

It’s also worth noting that Yandex has already dipped its toe in the water regarding supporting promising startups. Since June last year, the company has hosted the Yandex.Start open-doors event three times, which led to the acquisition of Loginza and WebVisor. So it’s quite reasonable to presume that investment from Yandex could eventually lead to a full exit via being acquired by the search engine.

On that note, Ksenia Yolkina, Project Manager of Yandex.Factory, chimes in on the merits of looking outside the company for new ideas. “Yandex is growing fast. We are full of ideas, but it’s not always easy to do everything at once. If we spot a young, talented team of like-minded people doing interesting and relevant things on the market, we are eager to support them in all possible ways, including financing.”

To join the Yandex.Factory program, startup teams in Russia or the CIS region can present their projects at the company’s open-doors event, Yandex.Start. International teams can send their application by emailing ventures@yandex-team.ru.

The new service (Google Translate, anyone?) translates text or web pages in Russian into English or Ukrainian. It works the other way round too. Text and web pages in English or Ukrainian can also be translated into Russian.

Yandex’s machine translation technology is said to be statistical:

It builds special-purpose dictionaries based on analyses of millions of documents – originals and translations. When translating text, the system picks the most statistically probable translation in a given context.

That said, Aleksey Baytin, head of Yandex.Translate, is honest enough to admit the system is far from perfect (anybody who has used competing services won’t be surprised) and that the human touch can’t be beaten but that machine translation is often just good enough.

“But, more often than not, all a user needs is just a general idea of what other people think of a hotel abroad or how a certain event is covered in the foreign media. An online translator can easily help with that. And do that in a matter of seconds”.

Launched in 2002, Yandex.Money enable users to transfer money between accounts and make payments via the Internet. It currently supports over 3,000 online retailers in Russia and internationally, including Skype.

And while the system uses rubles as its currency, to support payment for purchases made in international stores, such as Amazon.com or Apple’s App Store, Yandex.Money offers a virtual payment card in US dollars or euros. The move by Yandex to broaden support for Yandex.Money is said to be a reflection of the way Internet use is developing in the rest of the CIS region and with it the online economy.

Jane Zavalishina, CEO of Yandex.Money, is quoted as saying:

“People living in the CIS countries use the same internet services as people living in Russia. They make connections in social networks, chat, play games, read books and listen to music. Now, just like web users in Russia, web users in the CIS can pay for any of these and many other online services using Yandex.Money.”

And, of course, the more frictionless online payments are, the better opportunities for startups to get paid, right?

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.

The Russian startup claims that its authorization form is installed on 6,500 sites, while its range of plugins support the likes of WordPress, phpBB, Joomla, Cogear, Drupal and other CMSes. Yandex says it plans to extend the list of supported providers and plugins and to translate Loginza to other languages.

Yandex says it’s on the hunt for other new and interesting projects, and to achieve this has partnered with a number of startup communities in Russia, including the GreenfieldProject, the Glavstart, the Higher School of Economics’ Business Incubator, the Academy of National Economy’s Business Incubator and the Techno Cup at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. To that end, the next Yandex.Start will be held on March 15th.

The feature itself, which involves local businesses paying for premium placements, is designed to harness the type of search queries whereby users are looking for company contact details. In response, Yandex will display a company’s location on a map, both in the search results on yandex.ru and in its dedicated mapping service. Those who have opted for premium placement will see their company’s location highlighted in such a way, along with contact details etc.

Because of its local nature, Yandex says the new ad product is an “ideal promotional solution for businesses like small bakeries, hairdressing salons, repair shops etc., who may not have an online presence and whose rivals are entirely local”. In other words, it’s another way to steal ad dollars from the offline world to online – watch out traditional yellow page directories.

Interestingly, Yandex appears to be shunning Google-style auctions for this particular ad product. The press release makes mention of geo-targeted ads being served at a fixed price for a fixed period of time. The only fluctuation being that ads in a city like Moscow are more expensive than in say, Samara (wherever that is).