Monthly Archive for December, 2009

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Mail.ru buys Astrum Online

I guess not everyone knows who Mail.ru and Astrum Online are. Mail.ru is the biggest Russian portal, community and mail service. Astrum is the biggest player in Russian online entertainment industry. It has a lot of free to play browser MMOs, many casual social networking games and a new large scale MMO Allods Online which is currently in beta stage for European users.

Here’s what an article on TechCrunch says:

Digital Sky Technologies (aka DST), the Russian Internet holding company that holds stakes in several major Russian-language social networking and communication players and notably also recently invested in Facebook, is melting two of its largest portfolio companies together into one online powerhouse.

For us fellow Astrum Online workers it rather looks like not as a merger but as Mail.ru bought us. Which isn’t bad actually. I think the resulting bigger company will be even more successful than Astrum alone which had significant growth during 2009, now it has a huge chunk of Russian MMO market and is expanding to Europe.

Porn site in Flash??

Twitter sometimes is so misleading. There’s an aggregator for flash-related tweets #ASHash which re-tweets interesting stuff sometimes (most of the time it posts a lot of useless ones though). So once it re-tweets this tweet saying “A site on Catalyst…” and linking somewhere. The link says Biggest porn site on the web YouPorn powered by Catalyst?

What the hell? A porn site made with Flash Catalyst? What’s the point of saying that a site is made with Flash Catalyst? But a porn site in flash should be funny to see…

But it turned out that Catalyst was just a stupid Perl framework.