Yandex debuts cloud storage service ahead of Google Drive's arrival, offers 10GB 

 

It should come as no surprise that Yandex, the dominant search engine in Russia, is closely watching Google to try and stay one step ahead of the global search giant.

The company really only needs to own the Russian market to thrive, and it’s doing a pretty good job at fending off Google by quickly releasing similar – and new – services (Maps, Navigator, photo sharing, social networking search – you name it).

Case in point: this morning Yandex launched a beta version of Yandex.Disk, a free cloud storage service that allows users to store their files online and access them from any Internet-enabled device. It’s only available in Russian though.

Google, of course, is prepping the launch of its Drive cloud storage service, which is rumored to offer 5 GB of storage space and in-app document editing capabilities.

Interestingly, China’s search leader Baidu also recently launched a cloud storage service to rival Google’s upcoming service, as well as other Web-based storage services like Microsoft SkyDrive, iCloud, Dropbox and Box.

The Yandex.Disk cloud storage service is accessible via a Web interface, and desktop clients for Windows and Mac OS. For users with iOS and Android smartphones, there’s also an extension to the Yandex.Mail app.

Yandex offers users up to 10 GB (page in Russian) of storage space for personal documents, photos, music, or videos. Interestingly, Yandex.Disk also automatically saves all attachments to the emails in their Yandex.Mail account.

The service has additional storage space allocated specifically for that purpose, the company says in a statement.

In addition, Yandex.Disk supports synchronization between devices, enabling users to save and edit text files, for example, from multiple PCs.

Currently, access to Yandex.Disk is exclusively granted by invitation (and, again, available in Russian only for the time being).

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Russian Search Giant Yandex Acquires Social News Startup ‘The Tweeted 

Times’

 

Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, has acquired startup venture The Tweeted Times, which enables people to create custom online ‘newspapers’ generated from their Twitter accounts. Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed, but Yandex says it aims to continue offering the social news service and that the entire The Tweeted Times team will be joining the search engine company.

The Tweeted Times was co-founded by Maxim Grinev and Maria Grineva, both computer scientists at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and others.

Its users include celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Alyssa MilanoLance Weiler. and

Yandex, which went public last May and is currently valued at just shy of $10 billion, plans to use technologies acquired from The Tweeted Times to boost its search and content services with information from social networks.

This is the third company Yandex has acquired in the past nine months – its most recent purchases include single sign-in plugin maker Loginza and WebVisor’s behavior analysis technology and team

The Tweeted Times, formerly called Twitter Times, competes with social news curation service Paper.li, which has itself raised over $2 million in financing.

Another company operating in this space is Summify.

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