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This week I have a solid crop of press covering Russian and Eastern European startups and internet businesses. Here it goes in no particular order.

On GoalEurope I shared my thoughts on GoalEurope’s place in CEE startup world, wrote about a new Russian venture fund Frontier Ventures, Runa Capital’s investment in Capptain, and announced launches of Webiny, ActiveGift and Slidemotion.

Bobbie Johnson of GigaOM met with Marina Treshchova, the CEO of Fast Lane Ventures and talked about Fast Lane Ventures strategy and approach to building Internet companies.

Mike Butcher talked to Tomas Stolfa of Vox.io on Vox.io about Vox.io’s new chat feature (this sentence compensates for the lack of GoalEurope’s comprehensive coverage of this Slovenian killer of Skype). Butcher approved.

Baltic startup Campalyst has been given a boost to grow: Amsterdam based VC HENQ has invested an undisclosed amount into the startup, the story broke on TechCrunch on Campalyst’s birthday. Not a bad present for a one-year old company.

Hungarian Ustream app for android hit 2.5 million downloads (they couldn’t wait until 3 million downloads to break the story apparently).

My post “How do you  go global against clones and competitors” has finally saw the light on TechCrunch. While not relating to CEE in particular, I give a number of examples of what challenges Internet companies faced in our region. Please do watch Morten Lund’s pitch at London Web Summit. He did get Chris Kowalczyk of HardGamma to commit to the minimal amount.

At this stage you might be tempted to ask me post a link to TechCrunch and go do something else. Well, we should all blame The Next Web for not covering much of our region this week. Also Arctic Startup was quiet on the Baltic front. So I proceed.

Hungarian Prezi’s lessons learned have been published on Europepreneurs.org. Apparently Prezi grows as fast as Evernote and Soundcloud.

Yandex now allows foreigners to connect their bank cards to Yandex money and pay for Internet purchases in Russia. North Americans are not provided with the service for now and by the look of it Ozon does not accept Yandex money.

Russian UNOVA reported the launch of Startup Point, which is a Russian version of AngelList. Three are about 350 registered investors and ten times as many startups.

EWDN News published an interview with Leonid Gluzman of Russian Daily deals aggregator Zina.ru. It was also cross-posted on the Arctic Startup.

Slovenian Zemanta got covered on Sprouter blog.

Russian accelerator Farminers brings Russian startups to the US’s RocketSpace to get ready for the US launch as their press release informs us. Farminers do not believe in the open institute of mentors and have their small group of dedicated mentors working with startup teams continuously.

Sarah Lacy of Pando Daily spoke to Misha Lyalin of Cut The Rope. My take-away from this post is that they didn’t really like each other, and that Lyalin does not trust Disney. Perhaps I have just read too many articles this week.

Today on GigaOM Bobbie Johnson wrote about PayPal’s ambitious plans in Russia to partner with Russian Post to issue prepaid cards for offline commerce (Andrei Romanenko of QIWI believes that it will take PayPal 3 years to introduce cards). The deal has not yet been closed.

See more stories on Eastist as Zuzana has released her latest roundup earlier today.

And a little gossip to wrap things up. VentureVillage published a post by Yakov Sadchikov who listed top 10 Russian startups. Please note that the list differs greatly compared to the list Yakov compiled just three months ago on his own Quintura blog with one possible exception: Oktogo remains number one Russian hottest startup. With all due respect to Marina Kolesnik, the founder and CEO Oktogo, I feel that a full disclosure is required, since Yakov is doing PR for Oktogo.

I remain baffled by the methodology of such rating, since it includes a “startup” AnywayAnyday, the company which is planning an IPO. Note to self: never do a startup rating even at the expense of missing out on extra clicks.

That’s all for this week. Still working on compiling G+ profiles and Twitter handles of New Europe’s tech entrepreneurs. If you don’t have one yet, please do and then ping me the details.

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