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For the lack of better news some tech blogs are favoring topics such as Olympic games, movies and what not. At GoalEurope we simply skip a day or two despite the blogger’s golden rule of “always be blogging”. Besides, my holidays are just around the corner, so there will be no updates for a couple of weeks to come. Sorry.

I’ve gathered some crumbs of the startup news from Eastern Europe, here they are.

EWDN has released its long-awaited report about Russian ecommerce industry, covering the volumes, the sales by region, main challenges and key players in Russian internet.  It states that Russian ecommerce reached $10,5 billion this year and had 25,000 online stores.  Only 10 stores made sales of $100 million or more. The report also lists publicly disclosed funding transactions for the period of 2010 – 2011. You can download free sections of the report here or purchase a complete version for Euro 3,000.

Launches

Polish Red Sky Group, the maker of FilesTube (100+ million monthly users) has announced a launch of its new business Bart VPN which allows people browse internet anonymously, to protect user’s privacy. If you go to its website, you will see your IP address listed in fat red letters, next to a green-coded suggestion how to deal with it. The service costs from Euro 5 per month. The website suggests it makes travelling easier: you can use Internet from abroad as if you were back home. It also promises to protect your data from hackers as the Internet traffic that comes from your computer becomes encrypted. I can think of thousands other uses, such as combatting GEMA in Germany or accessing US TV shows.

There is another service addressing the same issue from Poland called Privacy Protector. I have learned about is after at the Startup Week Vienna, but when I attempted to try it, there was a glitch and I could not use it.

We wrote about Bulgarian accelerator Launchub’s crop of startups here.

Polish accelerator Huge Thing has announced a launch of one of its startups Sellbox.  Sellbox allows its users sell any file from its Dropbox account, and share a link to that file on social networks promoting them to its users. Sellbox retains 9 percent commission on sales price. It reminded me of its competitor Sellfy from Latvia, the graduate of the Lithuanian accelerator Startup Highway. In both cases I am curious about an issue of users’ selling unauthorized content.

Russian EWDN covered a cloud-based photo editing startup Gfranq I found quite interesting. The website offers  42 Instagram-type photo filters to amateur photographers who can instantly add a touch of class to their images without having to learn special effects in Photoshop. Apparently the startup got 100,000 users in 3 months.

News reviews

Some nasty rumors got through the startup-accelerator silence of solidarity, as an unidentified Russian startup leaked term sheet of recently launched accelerator GTI Labs we wrote about recently. Apparently the startup has to pay the accelerator $5,000 only to receive $25,000 from the venture fund and give another $20,000 again to GTI. According to the blog Silicon Rus, this “money” costs 15 percent of the company equity. So the accelerator gets $25K and the equity in exchange for two coaches. Further details are not very clear, but at the end of the “seed” round the startup gets $10K and retains 55 percent equity.

Wired did a feature story on Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of antivirus program Kaspersky Labs. He has a curious opinion on social networks, I quote the article ‘” Especially dangerous, he says, is the role of social networks in fueling protest movements from Tripoli to Moscow, where blogger Alexei Navalny has emerged as perhaps the most important dissident leader and sites like VK and LiveJournal have helped bring tens of thousands of people into the streets. Kaspersky sees these developments as part of a disinformation campaign by antigovernment forces to “manipulate crowds and change public opinion.”’ This I might add comes when the rest of the world praised Facebook power in overthrowing repressive regimes. The article proceeds to affirm Kaspersky’s strong links with the Russian government.

Have a good week.

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