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Two Russian investment groups have acquired a 63.3 percent stake in Ukranian web portal Meta, in a deal believed to be worth around $3 million. Russian Funds Investment Group and Digital Sky Technologies, an internet fund, contributed equally in the general-purpose service, which operates search, news, email and other features and reached 1.5 million users last year, according to the Kiyv Post. They will now invest a further $1 million toward improving the search functionality sufficiently to compete with Ukranian versions of Google and Russia’s Yandex, the Post says.

C Squared Holdings, a UK-based publisher and event organizer for the advertising industry, has raised nearly $500K from The Capital Fund, PEHub reports.
C Square publishes the 17-year-old ad magazine Media & Marketing Europe. Two years ago, the company began publishing an offshoot, Cream, which covers media planning. As for events, next month, C Squared will organize The Venice Festival of Media, a two-day conference sponsored by Yahoo, AOL, Discovery Communications, Financial Times and others.
On the personnel front, the company recently named former ZenithOptimedia executive Simon Marquis as chairman, according to Brand Republic.

In Spain, production powerhouse Mediapro is teaming with telcos Telefonica and Alcatel-Lucent, and public broadcaster TVC to kickstart a new-media R&D outfit i3media with about $46.4 million in funding, reports Variety. i3media will pull together Spain’s dispersed new-media R&D community, allowing large-scale R&D previously impossible in the country, the story says. Among its aims: exploring upgrades in digital cinema sports transmissions, and reproducing the ease of Internet navigation on TV sets.
Release: i3media is one of the big 15 technology research projects selected in the second round of offers as part of the Cénit initiative, which in turn is part of the Ingenio 2010 project set up to foster public and private cooperation in audiovisual research and development.

Google has come out with a bullish defence against Viacom’s $1 billion copyright lawsuit. The Guardian quotes Google’s head of video content partnerships, Patrick Walker, speaking in London: “Viacom took one approach, and people like the BBC have taken another approach. We’re not slowing down in any way. It goes to tell that the usage of YouTube has grown significantly from the Viacom announcement. We don’t see it impacting our business.”
The BBC signed a carriage and ad revenue-share deal with the video sharing site last month that places short program clips on three YouTube channels. Viacom, on the other hand, served a lawsuit claiming a massive copyright abuse over YouTube’s use of some 150,000 clips. The two companies operate in different markets, of course - BBC has been charged with adding more commercial revenue streams though its content is owned by the British public, while Viacom’s material is its own to monetize.
Related:
- More on Youtube-Rivals JV: Fox, NBC and Sony; Distribution on MySpace, MSN and Yahoo
- BBC In Clips Deal With YouTube; Ad Rev Share; UK Blackout On News Clip
- Viacom Sues Google-YouTube: Wants More Than $1 Billion In Damages, Injunction

The UK’s second-placed magazine publisher, Emap, is looking to expand its online media strategy, with a deadline having just expired for three new digital directors. The new hires will be deployed in the company’s lifestyle, specialist and radio consumer divisions. This advertisement (in the Google cache) signals Emap’s intention: “The ‘digital’ business accounts for circa 10 percent of the total group revenues; our ambition is for 30 percent of the Emap PLC business to be ‘digital’ within 3 years, to grow revenues from in excess of £4 million ($87.5 million) to create a £100 million ($194.5 million) business by 09/10.” Emap has so far dipped its toes into the water with a range of branded TV channels, a partnership with 3 UK to provide mobile ringtones, a hook-up with user-generated content enabler Activefone to take photos from readers and, most notably, its February acquisition of UGC platform YoSpace.
- Investment: “Increasingly Emap’s core consists of not only magazines and local radio, but also of websites, information businesses, conferences, multi-channel TV and mobile services,” Emap Performance MD Dharmash Mistry, told the UK’s Association of Online Publishers.
“The new directors will lead group-wide strategic initiatives across the business and stimulate, encourage and filter digital investment ideas – either organic or acquisition – and help the teams access seed funding to develop these ideas.”
Related:-
-- UK Publisher Emap Snaps Up Mobile Social Media Firm YoSpace For $17.1 Million

An interesting but ultimately minor move from Lycos Europe, the independent company (not part of Lycos USA....partly owned by Bertelsmann of Germany and Telefonica of Spain). It cannot enter U.S. using its own once-famous name, as Lycos U.S. is here, and now owned by Korean portal company Daum. So it is using the brand and services of Jubii, its Danish search and community business, and will launch here in a month or so, reports IHT.
The service combines search, e-mail, chat, photo and file storage, phone texting, blogging, Internet phoning and other Web 2.0 type service. Lycos U.S. here partly positions itself similarly, so will be interesting to see how that plays out. Lycos Europe claims 31 million unique users on sites it owns as well as partner sites; about half of its users are in Britain, Germany and France, with the rest scattered around the world.
Interestingly, Lycos Europe has had a single CEO throughout its 10-year history, rare for an online consumer service...Christoph Mohn is the CEO and part of the family that runs Bertelsmann, the media giant that owns Random House, Gruner + Jahr, RTL and part of Lycos Europe. His parents, Liz and Reinhard Mohn, are the driving forces on the company’s supervisory board, which Christoph Mohn just joined last month.
There is a line of thought that Bertelsmann needs the company for its eventual Internet strategy, and this would possibly have implications in U.S. as well.