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Russian Company Buys ICQ

Posted by Soulskill on from the end-of-a-market-strategy dept.

An anonymous reader writes "AOL has sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's largest Internet company, for US$187.5 million. DST's offer was apparently more attractive than those of Russia's ProfMedia and China's Tencent. ICQ, originally released in 1996 and bought by AOL in 1998 for US$407 million, was one of the world's first major instant messaging systems. Although largely forgotten in English-speaking countries, it remains widely popular in Central Europe, Russia, and Israel. Moscow News has additional coverage of the deal."

1 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Well, given the tons spam from that region by sopssa · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I think you are wrong too. Your opinion is based on what western newspapers write. Every country with a huge amount of population has bad people and those are the things that get in to news. Just like US in the other stories.

    I personally have lived in Russia for a few years. I don't even talk Russian, and everyone helped me in stores, metro stations, bank and local kiosks. Always when I went to store I could communicate with the cashier by using hand marks and she was helpful and smiled. That wouldn't happen in Sweden - everyone is way too racist towards foreign people and it looks like US has the same mentality. When I was getting a local mobile contract an older women came to help me as the seller didn't understand English. She neither didn't understand most of the things I tried to say, but still a small amount, and she tried to help me and because of her I understood what I was getting. And she was a random person on the street that took 10 mins of her time to help me, even without asking her to. Same thing with a guy in the near kiosk that translated the prices to English when he saw I didn't understand the language. I have a lot of more examples from the time I was living there, but you'll probably understand.

    I personally think Russian people, in general, are a lot more friendly than American. They really will help a stranger if there is a need to. I wouldn't say the same about Americans, who would probably just joke and make fun of a person needing help. Do you think I would get the same nice help in the US?

    Try living there for a moment before judging all the people.