OREANDA-NEWS. December 24, 2010. Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, has purchased WebVisor technology. The acquisition is a result of the “open days for startups”, a Yandex initiative under the Yandex.Start program.

Yandex launched its startup-support program last summer. The company is primarily interested in developer teams in multimedia, data processing and data structuring, geo information systems and advertising technologies. Yandex.Start is aimed at supporting emerging talent, encouraging young companies and the industry as a whole. Yandex supports startups by offering its technologies (as APIs), computing facilities and expert advice.
To find new and interesting projects, Yandex partners with a number of startup communities in Russia, including the GreenfieldProject, the Glavstart, the Higher School of Economics’ Business Incubator, the Academy of National Economy’s Business Incubator and the Techno Cup at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Yandex gives the most promising developer teams an opportunity to join the Yandex.Start program and to present their ideas and technologies during the company’s open days. The event, which has already taken place twice, gathered a total of 13 participants. WebVisor participated in the September open-day session.

The technology purchased from WebVisor provides visitor behavior analysis (mouse movement, clicks, text copying etc.) and will be integrated with the company’s own visitor statistics tool, Yandex.Metrica. The WebVisor team has joined Yandex to work on merging their technology into the company’s framework. WebVisor will keep servicing existing clients, but the service will not accept new and potential customers.

To learn more and join Yandex.Start, please visit http://company.yandex.ru/public/start/ (in Russian).