Getty Images Segalovich: Turkey is a huge opportunity<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cWe liked Turkey first because they have great growth opportunities. It is a huge country with lots of potential users [and a] fast-growing Internet. We looked at the services provided by Google. Without competition the quality of the services is lower than it is with competition.\u201d<\/p>\n
But, said Mr. Segalovich, there was simply the difficulty of the challenge itself. \u201cWill we be able to go to the country where we don\u2019t know the language? It is not going to the country where most of the employees speak Russian, like Bulgaria or Poland. Going to Turkey no one speaks Russian. We had to redesign all the internal procedures and the parts of the engine to be worked with people who don\u2019t know Russian.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was one interesting challenge they had to tackle regarding their version of Street View: the law required them to blur faces. \u201cThat is technologically a hard task to do. Google was doing that. It required a super-hard effort to have a face recognition on a huge scale. We spent three months making this,\u201d Mr. Segalovich said.<\/p>\n
But there was a problem. \u201cUnfortunately, we blurred Ataturk\u2019s face. There is another law that prohibits this in Turkey.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, every time a complaint is raised about blurring of Ataturk\u2019s face, the company goes in by hand and manually un-blurs the image. \u201cWe are very happy to do this. It is about being culturally sensitive,\u201d Mr. Segalovich said.<\/p>\n
Mr. Segalovich wouldn\u2019t say which countries the company was looking at next, but did hint that further expansion was highly likely. He suggested that it was more likely to be elsewhere in Europe, rather than in areas like the Middle East.<\/p>\n
In a wide ranging interview, Mr. Segalovich also said Russian e-commerce is set to take off thanks to Apple Inc.\u2019s iPhone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe iPhone appears and suddenly Russians start to pay for apps on the iPhone,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can imagine how hard it was to get people to pay just 100 rubles ($3.40) over the Internet just a few years ago. They were just \u2018why should I? Can I find it free?\u2019 Now it is getting more like a habit after the iPhone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Segalovich was a guest speaker at the recent TNW conference in Amsterdam and discussed how the Russian Internet is changing and the company\u2019s recent expansion into Turkey.<\/p>\n
He admitted that even if people wanted to pay for things, the mechanisms to do so and the logistics to deliver goods have some way to go. Still, he was optimistic that change was happening quickly.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can look at the share of tickets bought online in Russia. After people start to use plastic cards to pay for tickets they get used to paying for anything else. That part of the story is changing rapidly in front of our eyes. There are lots of good signs about that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yandex is Russia\u2019s largest search engine and claims to be the most popular site in the Russian-speaking Internet. In May 2011, Yandex raised $1.3 billion in an initial public offering on the Nasdaq. It was the biggest U.S. IPO for a dotcom since Google Inc. went public in 2004.<\/p>\n
Ilya Segalovich,<\/p>\n
Russia,<\/p>\n
Turkey,<\/p>\n
Yandex<\/p>\n
via Yandex Aims For 20% of Turkey\u2019s Traffic – Tech Europe – WSJ.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yandex, Russia\u2019s largest search engine, is aiming for at least 20% of Turkey\u2019s search traffic after the company expanded there last year, according to the company\u2019s co-founder. Ilya Segalovich, CTO of Yandex, told The Wall Street Journal Europe that in most markets the dominant search player has 60% to 70% of the market, while the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":53075,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[846],"tags":[7017],"class_list":["post-53073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-yandex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}