According to Russia’s Daily Online, it will provide news content alongside with Reuters and AP for the Russian MSN. Russian MSN, with an aim to aggregate the great content and stuff on the Web for the Russian, is trying to draw more visitors to the MSN home page by expanded into Russia. With 50 million monthly U.S. visitors as revealed by comScore last month, the Russian market seem to be a major challenge for MSN in this year. And over time, MSN Russian would offered branded content, ranging from sport and entertainment to news and finance.

Prior to this launch, the msn.ru domain was a property of Roman Elkhadjiev, who sold it to Microsoft for approx. US1 million on April 2007, as reported by CNews Russia.

The other day I came across an article that entitled a former executive of MSN has joined Mozilla’s Chinese subsidiary, Mozilla Online, as its chairman and CEO. Li Gong, the new Chairman and CEO left MSN China on December 4 last year, was a key man in several companies include Sun and MSN China. Other than this, he also holds a first degree, and Master at Tsinghua University and a PhD holder at Cambridge University. Prior to joining Mozilla, he was a visiting professor at Stanford and Cornell University and as a member of the editor committee of IEEE Internet Computing and ACM TISSEC, according to this article (in Mandarin).

However, Li Gong explained his role at Mozilla is to set up a new company, i.e. Beijing Mou-Zhi Network Technologies Ltd. 谋智网络技术有限公司 in this July.

…..increasing adoption of the Firefox browser and other relevant products and technologies in China, building local developer and user communities, developing local partnerships, and participating in and helping to advance the state of art of open source software in China.

Nevertheless, there will be no such “Firefox China” to be launched, according to a news (in Mandarin) in China.

I just came across a new Microsoft Search website. Microsoft has replaced their favorite blue color to the black and white, as shown in the picture above. It provides search on the Microsoft Downloads, Support, MSDN, TechNet, Company Information, XBox, and Communities. In a general sense, a website redesigns mean an upgraded version of a particular website. I wonder the Microsoft Search redesigns can be viewed as the signal of their efforts in improving the effectiveness and efficiency of Microsoft’s search capabilities?

In terms of color, white mean simplicity and cleanliness. On the other hand, black represent seriousness, secrecy, does this mean when an user tend to search a content inside Microsoft’s server, he/she is serious about it? And Microsoft is served as a “secret garden” to most of its users?

Tencent Inc. of China has released a new version of messenger, i.e. Tencent Messenger (TM) 2007 Beta 1. It is designed to meet the needs of office use, and new features such as e-name card, TM secretary, memo, auto-responder, encryption when sending sensitive message, and etc have been added to this 2007 beta 1. It is only available to use on Windows 2000/XP platforms, and the download size is relatively small, i.e. 9.81MB. Click here for the download page. You need to have a QQ account in order to login for use or you will need to create another new TM account as required by Tencent. I still wonder whether it would be works on Linux or some other platforms than Windows. As you can see in its home page, this messenger’s window is small, and therefore, it convinced the users that it would not consumed a lot of memory or resources of the users’ PC.

Unlike QQ, its target market is corporate office. Since QQ is famous in China, and most of the users are the relatively young people that use QQ for social networking, chat, and etc. This TM seems to be designed for the niche market, i.e. corporate people. What caught the eyes of corporate for this product is its security enhancements. TM 2007 beta 1 is known to have some password protection, encryption system as mentioned above that well-suited for the corporate white-collar workers. When compare these two products developed by Tencent, they have a common characteristics, i.e. free!

I believed the launched of this messenger would posed a threat to the MSNShell, another well-known brand name in the China’s messenger market. Since there are problems as posted by this blog (in Mandarin) when using MSNShell due to the Taiwan quake. The launched of this TM 2007 beta 1 tend to served as an expanded plan to lure away some MSNShell users.

N.B. MSNShell is served as a product that enhance the features of MSN Messenger. Some plugins have been created to further improve the user experiences of MSNShell.