Profy

A week ago, last Friday, Russian carriers and retailers started to officially sell iPhone in Russia so Russian people have been able to officially and legally buy the much-hyped Apple's device for a week now. But unfortunately Apple can hardly claim any significant success in Russia because of a few reasons with the most aggravating one being the price that seems to be far from fair when you compare to what people around the world pay for the gadget.

The problem is that Russia is one of the few countries where local carriers have not managed to negotiate agreeable conditions with Apple to sell iPhone under contract - hence the price of over $1,000. To be specific, the 8 Gb iPhone is sold for 23 thousand rubles (about $880) while the 16 Gb phone is priced at 27,000 rubles which equals $1,030...

We have already grown quite accustomed to the fact that all the most interesting things in the web 2.0 industry invariably happen in the Silicon Valley while the rest of the world can only hope to come up with a good startup now and then that will gain traction thanks to a Bay Area investor. But living in Russia I know pretty well that there are lots of innovative ideas along with talented developers in Europe as well.

Thus it is always a pleasure for me to see yet another conference dedicated to technology innovation and web 2.0 in Europe (with the most prominent being Loic Le Meur's Le Web 3 December event in Paris)...

Today citizens of Kazakhstan and even the adjacent Kirgizia for some reason have not managed to access LiveJournal blogging platform entirely. Since both countries are still very much influenced by Russia and Russian culture, LiveJournal is also a very popular blogging platform there same as it is here in Russia so this is an important event for bloggers from the two countries.

There have not been any official comments on the situation yet but users of various ISPs in Kazakhstan report they are unable to access LiveJournal website at all...

Today the hottest topic in the blogosphere is the fact that Apple has finally officially stated the date for its next major announcement where the new laptops by Apple will be shown to the invited reporters, journalists and bloggers. I have decided to summarize everything we already know about the announcement here and some of the most probably rumors to know what to expect and to see how true our expectations are.

First of all, the event itself will take place on Tuesday next week at 10 a.m. PDT in Cupertino...

Today I am pleased to be able to exclusively report on launch of a very interesting website - BookRix. The Munich-based company has been operating the German-language site in the .de domain zone for a while now and today they are making the debut of the English-language version. The German-language community seems to be a pretty active one to me so hopefully for the company this will be repeated in the English-language version as well.

The site's owners describe it as a YouTube or Flickr for emerging authors where they can easily showcase and share their work to get some extra visibility for their creations...

We have recently discussed a lot the possibility of an initial public offering for Yandex, the major Russian search engine and provider of various internet services. Initially Yandex was planning an IPO on NASDAQ for some time this fall - yet we suggested that it was not actually wise with the negative reaction to the conflict between Georgia and Russia.

The opinion that the background was not quite suitable for the IPO was confirmed by an investment fund close to many internet companies in Russia: they mentioned Yandex would postpone IPO for 2009...

Of course the unfavorable economic environment will hardly let us see dozens of new amazing startups launched on a daily basis in the nearest few months. But we will be sure to still see startups launched that will have a solid business model which means a specific customer base along with some value to provide these customers with for a fee.

I have already mentioned that I think porn will be one of the things people will hardly stop to consume during a recession when I suggested that Playboy should make a feature for unemployed women in tech soon...

Duncan Riley has reported an interesting piece of information from the source he describes as "reliable, would have access to such information, and who has been accurate in the past". The report is about new price lists Apple retailers received from the company where there is a new position - a laptop priced at $800.

According to Duncan's source, Apple laptops range includes 4 new positions in addition to the current 8 laptops (3 Macbooks, 3 Macbook Pros and 2 Macbook Airs). Prices for the laptops range from $800 to $3,100 in the price sheet...

Sequoia Capital is one of the best-known names when it comes to venture funding of startups in the Silicon Valley so everything the firm does is considered as having strong implications for the entire industry. So it is no wonder that the players in the industry are more than worried today now that Om Malik reports that Sequoia held a meeting for founders of its portfolio companies to talk about the economic crisis to them.

The CEOs and founders were met with a gravestone that reportedly read "RIP Good Times" - this was supposed to make sure no one has doubts the situation is really bad and will be getting even worse...