What would the Web be like without social media, relational databases or first-rate search engines? When you look at the biggest and most successful Web companies – today the building blocks of our modern online lives – it is hard to imagine them as start-ups, facing challenges to get traction with users, battling with investors over strategy or struggling to prove they can make it outside of their home market. Informilo talks to Yandex, MySQL and a former Twitter executive about lessons learned.Read more

Outside of Russia, the U.S., China, South Korea and the Czech Republic, there is little, if any, competition in search.Read more

Russia is experiencing a gold rush of sorts, as venture funds from the U.S and Europe attempt to cash in on the largest and fastest-growing Internet market in Europe.

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The prevailing wisdom is that U.S. companies rule the Internet. Think again. This year Russia’s most popular Internet search engine, Yandex, raised $1.4 billion in an initial public offering on Nasdaq, significantly more than either LinkedIn or Groupon — the biggest IPO for an Internet company since Google listed in 2004.

Now the homegrown Russian search engine giant is moving into Turkey.Read more

To identify the most promising Internet companies in Europe Informilo Editor-in-Chief Jennifer L. Schenker asked some of the Continent's most active investors to nominate companies outside of their own portfolios. While companies copying existing business models like Zalando, KupiVIP and grupfoni are doing well we chose to spotlight innovative European technologies or business models, from early to late stage. Some are well known, others are below the radar but unlikely to stay that way for very long. Read on to see are our picks for the top 25:Read more

Internet doyenne Esther Dyson was awarded the Aenne Burda Creative Leadership award at the Digital, Live, Design or DLD conference in Munich on January 25.  Dyson,  who is currently training to be a cosmonaut, talked to Informilo about why this is a great time to start a business, her investments in Russia, personalized medicine and space technology.Read more