Russian

DST, Silver Lake and Yunfeng Lead $1.6B Tender Offer Aimed at Alibaba Employees at $32B Valuation

Kara Swisher in News on September 22, 2011 at 5:45 am PT

Big play in China, as big investors pour a fortune into Alibaba Group shares to give its employees some walking-around money.

Twitter Poised to Close a Two-Stage $800M Funding, With Half Used to Cash Out Investors and Employees

Kara Swisher in Social on July 20, 2011 at 12:42 pm PT

In a move reminiscent of one done by Facebook in 2009, Twitter is zeroing in on a complex $800 million funding deal, which includes a tasty $400 million payout for its current investors and also employees.

Exclusive: Zynga About to File for IPO

Kara Swisher in News on May 24, 2011 at 3:32 pm PT

Zynga is poised to file for its initial public offering, according to sources close to the situation, as early as this week, or next week at the latest. The San Francisco-based online gaming company’s valuation in its last round of funding was $10 billion, but it is likely to price itself higher in an offering, given the recent series of strong IPOs for Internet companies.

Will Secretary of State Clinton's "Internet Freedom Agenda" Finally Get Traction?

Kara Swisher in News on February 16, 2011 at 7:09 am PT

Yesterday, in a major policy speech in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton jumped on the Internet bandwagon again, unveiling a $25 million government investment for entrepreneurs to allow dissidents to thwart “thugs, hackers and censors.” Since that’s about the amount a third-string social photo-sharing site gets while walking down University Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif., from venture capitalists with bags of money to spend, let me just say the money is, well, underwhelming. Clinton’s speech, thankfully, was much better.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Says Company Needs to Unify Its Experience Across Devices

Ina Fried in Mobile on February 14, 2011 at 8:28 am PT

In addition, Costolo announced the company will offer crowdsourced translations of the service into Russian, Turkish and Indonesian. Also doing own translation to Portuguese later this year.

Cisco Security Survey Finds Windows Vulnerabilities And Spam Decreasing

Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on January 20, 2011 at 6:40 am PT

Still no rest for the weary computer security professional. Smartphones and tablets are coming to the office and creating new opportunities for trouble.

Groupon Poised to Strike Partnership With China's Tencent, in Key Global Expansion Move

Kara Swisher in News on January 16, 2011 at 3:00 pm PT

Groupon is in talks with Chinese Internet giant Tencent to form a partnership to accelerate its effort in the critical Asian arena, said several sources with knowledge of the situation. Terms of the deal are unclear, but sources said that it is likely to involve some sort of co-branded joint venture effort between the two–a key strategic move for Groupon, given the hard-to-penetrate-if-you’re-not-Chinese Chinese market.

Russia's DST Out of Twitter Funding Race, With Kleiner Poised to Take the Deal

Kara Swisher in News on December 6, 2010 at 11:24 am PT

According to sources close to the situation, the aggressive Russian investment outfit DST Global is out of the running to fund Twitter. Instead, the prize is almost certainly going to Kleiner Perkins, the legendary Silicon Valley venture firm of Web 1.0 that has been making a big push of late into the Web 2.0 market. The valuation for the new round–which sources said is well above $150 million–will be from $3.5 billion to $4 billion. There also might be smaller investors in the new round, which could be completed next week.

Dorky Park: Nokia Sics Russian Police on Blogger With Prototype Phone

John Paczkowski in News on July 7, 2010 at 3:21 pm PT

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A prominent consumer electronics company has asked authorities to help it retrieve a prototype phone from the journalist who revealed it–prematurely–to the world. Sounds a lot like the Gizmodo/iPhone 4 prototype debacle, doesn’t it? But it’s not. This time, the consumer electronics company is Nokia, the journalist is Eldar Murtazin, editor-in-chief of Moscow-based mobile-review.com, and the authorities are the Russian police.