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$17 Thousand for a Few Online Hours on iPhone in RoamingAugust 17

Last week the blogosphere in Russia discussed yet another interesting topic regarding the famous Apple’s device and a huge bill sent to one of subscribers of a local mobile carrier for some international exuberance. And since the summer full of vacations abroad is in full play, the story quickly got to be a very hot one though there’s nothing particularly special about it – nothing but the amount of the bill involved: $17 thousand from a cell phone carrier after a vacation abroad.

The story involves a woman who had a corporate iPhone paid for by her employer which she used as her only phone and did not think twice about using when she headed to Egypt for a vacation with her son. Over there her son spent about 4 hours playing mobile games on the device (really, kids love them, everyone knows) which resulted in an enormous bill for GPRS received upon arrival.

But since the phone was corporate and the woman happened to work for a well-known (and quite wealthy) company, the management has attempted to initiate a discussion with the carrier trying to prove that the carrier has enabled a service of mobile roaming without subscriber’s knowle

Russian Village Almost Got Named after a Torrent Website in a Publicity StuntAugust 9

I know this may sound ridiculous and even unbelievable but the story has actually received huge attention in the Russian news sources and blogs – as it the story is actually true. I’ve checked, the news is not dated April 1st no matter how appropriate it could be for the day but the entire Russian blogosphere is now discussing how Russia now supposedly has a village named after a website – and a website that works in the frequently criticized and discussed in courts field of torrent tracking and p2p sharing. The only problem is that the story has actually turned to be a fake one, probably designed specifically for PR purposes but the idea is definitely worth mentioning.

TorrentReactor.net, one of the top 10 torrent indexers in the world that is hosted in Russia has claimed to have paid about $150 thousand to obtain the right to rename a Russian village named Gar located in the Tomsk region in Siberia. This idea has been discussed with the population of the village (a total of 214 people) and the people are told to support the idea of having their short and easily pronounced name replaced with a longer one after the buying website. I guess the idea of each having

How Targeted Are Targeted Ads These Days?August 5

If a person knows anything at all about internet business, they certainly know that those numerous web sites they visit every day are mostly supported by advertising – those flashy banners that are everywhere these days. But since no one ever clicks those “You are one millionth visitor, click here for your prize” banners, everyone in the online business knows there’s one important thing about ads that actually makes them work: targeting.

It is simple: if you want to sell shoes in your San Francisco store, you will not want your ads to be visible to people somewhere in Texas because chances of them actually making a purchase from your store are very low (virtually non-existent given that they could only buy your shoes if they visit California for some reason and actually remember the ad and be motivated enough to go and buy the shoes). So most advertisers these days (especially those that sell some real-life goods or services) prefer to decide exactly what groups of users will be exposed to their ads.

Targeting for ads may vary depending on the location, age, gender, and other factors that are important for advertisers for any number of reasons. And since advertisers only want to pay to reach specific categories of users, it is just logical that advertising networks and independent online publishers follow and offer all types of targeting to their customers – and only serving ads to those people who fall into the target audience for the advertiser.

Bureaucrats Now Have a Social Network of Their Own in RussiaJuly 20

It is quite obvious that the social networking boom of the recent years has resulted in abundance of social networks that probably cover all the niches of society. It is quite obvious that in some countries (like Russia where I live) this process is taking longer than it did in the US because all the trends arrive here with a noticeable delay. So while the US has social networks for everything already, in Russia we are now witnessing yet another novelty – a social network intended specifically for state officials.

The social network is promptly named Gosbook (where ‘Gos’ is part of the Russian word that stands for ‘state’), features a proud ‘beta’ tag in the logo and has all the features we have come to expect of a social network – user profiles, blogs, groups, and friends who are colleagues here to stick to a generally more official tone of the site.

While usually everything that is developed by request of any state or regional authorities tends to be overpriced in the country – corruption is a huge problem in Russia that I don’t expect officials will really want to discuss online or offline. For some reason this project

So Which One Is Stronger: Traditional Media or Social Media?July 17

If you have chosen internet as the place where you do business (no matter what business it is), you probably realize that some of the things that matter to you are hardly important for the rest of the world. You dream about things like getting to the front page of Digg or listening in person to Steve Jobs introducing their brightest shiny product to a huge audience or having 2,000 followers on Twitter, or whatever. These are some of the common things that inspire the online crowd and have a chance of making people in this business actually happy – despite of the fact that the majority of the world has never heard about Twitter and hardly knows what Digg is.

I know that every industry has its specific ideals, goals and celebrities but online world is probably the most peculiar one because the number of people working online is particularly large and we are very good in passing the information within the crowd with a huge speed – so myths can be born here in huge volumes and at the speed of light. One of the most interesting myths that we all share is the power of social media – something that every ‘social media expert’ is supposed to believe with all