Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Yandex

Russian Search Engine Company Yandex Acquires SPB For $38 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 08:06:08 +0000

Russian search engine company Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX) has been having a big week. Last week Yandex announced that they will be the default search engine on Windows Phones in Russia. Earlier this week, Yandex announced that they have acquired mobile software company SPB Software. The price of SPB Software is believed to be around $38 million.

SPB started in 1999 and originally focused on developing applications for Android and Windows mobile devices. SPB has been making their applications cross-platform since then. Some of SPB’s applications include a mobile wallet, data traffic analytics, games, a mobile user interface builder, and web TV integration.

Yandex spokesperson Ochir Mandzhikov was particularly interested in the mobile user interface engine for mobile devices and tablets called Shell 3D. Yandex plans on using Shell 3D for their cloud services and technologies.

Russian Search Engine Company Yandex Prices Shares At $20-$22 In $1.2 Billion IPO

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 12 May 2011 03:57:30 +0000

Yandex is a Russian search engine company that has recently filed for an initial public offering on the NASDAQ under the symbol YNDX. Yandex also recently announced that they are pricing the offering at between $20-$22 per share. Yandex is planning to raise about $1.2 billion from the sale of the shares.

Yandex is proposing the sale of 15.4 million shares in the offering. The underwriters have been given an option to purchase up to an additional 5.2 million shares. The total amount of the shares that will be offered in the filing total is 52.2 million.

In March 2011 Yandex received about 38.3 million unique visitors. They made total revenues of about $440 million in 2010.

[TechCrunch]

Facial Recognition Service Face.com Raises $4.3 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 14:45:19 +0000

Face.com is a facial recognition service that is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Supposedly Face.com has a 90% accuracy when identifying your face in a Facebook picture.

Earlier this week Face.com raised $4.3 million in Series B funding in a round led by Rhodium and Yandex. Yandex is Russia’s largest search engine company. Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh joined the Face.com board of directors as a result of the funding round.

Face.com was started in 2007 and launched publicly in 2009. The startup uses technology that develops an algorithm from a face and the arrangement of the features. Between Photo Finder and Photo Tagger, two of the company’s Facebook applications, they have scanned about 7 billion images and identified 56 million faces.

This past May, Face.com raised $5.3 million and launched an API for developers to create their own facial recognition applications.

[Vator.tv]

Google To Lose Search Market Share In Russia

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:31:09 +0000

Google has been the default search engine company for the Mozilla Firefox browser. This is mainly due to Google’s financial support of Mozilla. In 2006, Google paid Mozilla about $57 million which amounted to 85% of their revenue. But now the Russian version of Firefox will be dropping Google as the default browser and switch it to Google’s Russian rival Yandex.

According to a blog post by Mozilla General Counsel Harvey Anderson, Russian Firefox users “wanted direct access to the Yandex search services in official Firefox RU builds” based on studying trends of Firefox Yandex builds. For the Firefox 3.1 Russian locale builds, Yandex will become the default search engine. This version will be released in the next few weeks.

In the last few months, Yandex was planning on going IPO, but postponed it until the economy recovers. Yandex gets about 50 million searches per day.

[Via Webware & TechCrunch]

Alisher Usmanov Looking To Invest In Yandex Search Engine

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:59:16 +0000

Alisher Usmanov is a billionaire based in Russia that made money from mining, lumber, and other investments. He is the 142nd richest person in the world with a value of $5.5 billion. Usmanov has been proactively investing in Internet companies. Usmanov is a majority owner in Digital Sky Technologies (owner of Mail.ru) and SUP (the owners of Live Journal since December 2007).

Usmanov is now pursuing a large investment into Yandex (Yandex in English). Yandex is a search engine that is currently in the planning stages of an IPO. Usmanov is interested in 10-20% of the company which could be valuated at $1 billion given Yandex’s $5 billion valuation.

Yandex is ranked #3 in search in Europe. Yandex had over 528 million monthly searches as of May 2008. Yandex made $167 million in 2007 revenues. Although the deal is not confirmed, this could be one of the largest investments made in a search engine.

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