This tidbit comes courtesy of app developers, who of course are now able to play with the preview of iOS 7 ahead of its consumer launch later this year. A Yandex spokesman subsequently confirmed the inclusion to me.

Here are tweets from devs in Russia:

Яндекс в iOS7 http://t.co/wnJMn2bqWr—
ʎɐsʇɐd ʎdɯnɹƃ (@alexmak) June 11, 2013

… And Turkey:

iOS 7 supports yandex search on Safari

@YandexComTr @yandex @YandexDestek http://t.co/0zCwTU5Oj2—
Bahaeddin Nakiboglu (@bahaeddin) June 10, 2013

Turkey is a particularly big win for Yandex, which is pushing hard into that country. As for the company’s more traditional markets, the inclusion of Yandex search as an option in Safari could even be seen as belated – the company has a majority share of the Russian search market, and a few months ago it even ranked higher than Microsoft’s Bing for numbers of searches on a global basis.

Yandex has already been supplying data for local users of Apple Maps since September last year.

Around the world, Google is the default search option for Apple’s customers. Bing and Yahoo are also global options. Not many local players get to join that list – although China’s Baidu is a notable exception in that country.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

Take Russia’s Yandex, for example. The company, which has serious data-wrangling chops and a majority share of the Russian search market, just launched a new feature that it calls “islands.” You know Google’s rich snippets – those chunks of information that webmasters can have show up as part of their listings in results pages? Islands are like those, only dynamic and interactive instead of static and purely informational.

Here’s how these islands work. Let’s say the user searches for “Moscow Berlin air tickets.” A normal search result will link to an airline’s website. A rich snippet will also present direct links to the airline’s booking or special offers pages, perhaps along with the airline’s telephone booking number and its opening times. An island, or interactive snippet, could present a form through which the user can check into their flight online or begin the booking process based on real-time data – right from within Yandex’s search results.

How about booking a doctor’s appointment from a results page?

Fighting apps with functionality

“We are in a world where search engines are evolving and need to compete with mobile applications,” Yandex CTO and co-founder Ilya Segalovich explained to me. “Mobile apps have a very focused way for the user to get what they really need, to buy a ticket or find a hotel … With this interface, we believe our web search will become more interactive and closer to the end-point of the user destination.”

Using this mechanism, webmasters could in theory allow entire transactions to be conducted within Yandex’s search results page. That said, there are numerous data protection considerations to be taken into account here, and Segalovich said Yandex didn’t expect many sites to dive in quite so drastically, at least not at this early stage. If they opt to have Yandex send users to their sites, the information gathered up until that point can be used to prefill sections on an on-site booking form.

“What we are going to do is we will provide for an open – which means indefinite – spectrum of queries, classes of queries,” Segalovich said. “What we do in our islands, basically we support Schema.org actions as part of our framework… it’s just a natural way of moving into the future.”

Expansion

As for which future Yandex is targeting, a heavy presence in Turkey is definitely top of the list. These new dynamic snippets are rolling out there first, before targeting Yandex’s other strongholds of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

The reason Yandex has such a heavy presence in Russia and neighboring countries is of course its focus on the local language – Russian is a complex tongue and specializing in interpreting its inflections has clearly paid dividends. But what about English-speaking countries?

“Talking about the English-speaking world, we do have a significant database and rather good search quality, primarily because part of our audience in all the countries we serve need English-language information and need English-language queries answered,” Segalovich said. “But we understand also that, with a company like us, if we want to go to some other market we have to be very focused on a particular market. If we go somewhere we go one country at a time.”

In device terms, incidentally, the new feature is rolling out on Yandex’s desktop search first, with mobile lined up.

It will be very interesting to see how many webmasters take up this offer and how they use it – Yandex is stressing that it’s totally up to them to decide what information shows up in these islands. If sites do bite, though, thanks to Yandex’s use of industry standards there’s also every chance that we will see similar functionality show up in rival search engines.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past
• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure

Now Google’s YouTube is setting up shop in Europe’s fastest growing internet market with official sanction – but that may call up the same kind of ethical concerns its parent has seen elsewhere.

Turkey says it has successfully convinced YouTube to operate at youtube.com.tr – a fact that means the video site will have to comply with the country’s own domestic laws on such things as censorship.

Transport and communications minister Binali Yildirim (via Reuters):

“It will now be in a binding and critical position to implement court decisions and remove any objectionable publications. Further more it will also pay taxes on its operations.”

The issues is thrown in to relief by last week’s government edict that the controversial video, The Innocence of Muslims, be censored in Turkey.

Google, Twitter and Facebook last year said they would comply with the local laws of countries in which they operate.

Turkey is not considered a wildly oppressive state, but its stance of freedom of expression has been a sticking point in Turkey’s efforts to gain European Union membership.

On the other hand, Turkey represents a tremendous business opportunity. With a young population, its online penetration surged from 15 percent in 2005 to 45 percent by late in 2011. And its 35 million users spend so much time online that they make Turkey the number-three country for time spent online per user.

YouTube.com was already the number-five site in the country last year, according to comScore.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• How consumer media will change in 2013

Rumors had been brewing for a few days, but on Friday the Turkish site Webrazzi reported that Rocket was closing down its Istanbul offices, laying off hundreds of workers and looking to close or sell off its Turkish sites. That was followed by several other reports quoting Rocket execs that confirmed the move.

I’ve asked Rocket for direct confirmation but, perhaps unsurprisingly, have not yet heard back. For the record, those properties — still listed on Rocket’s corporate site — are Eleseri (jewellery), Evimister (homewares), Sporena (sports apparel), Zidaya (clothing), and a local branch of the Westwing home and living shopping club.

But wait: Turkey is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, so why is Rocket withdrawing?

According to a source quoted by Venture Village, the margins were just too low. If that’s the case, Rocket clearly doesn’t hang around when it comes to evaluating a likely failure — GoDaddy’s records suggest the domain for Zadaya, a Turkish equivalent to Rocket’s hugely successful Zalando, was only registered this February.

Then again, the Samwers’ operations tend to have a reputation for almost capricious hiring and firing. For recent evidence, I’d recommend reading a blog post written by a disgruntled employee in the Philippines last week (warning: contains the phrase “everything was like a Hitler-decision”, which is unlikely to go down well with German employers) .

Whatever the reason for Rocket sailing off into the sunset, it represents something of a blow for the Samwers’ reputation as kings of internationalization – it seems they can’t do it all, after all.

Maybe that’s why Rocket has joined hands with Millicom for its expansion into Latin America and Africa: if they’re going to set up as quickly as possible, as is the Samwer way, they now see the benefit of teaming up with someone that has the local knowledge they lack.

Still, it’s not all bad news for Rocket. When they do it right, they really do it right. Just look at JP Morgan’s investment in Zalando yesterday – Rocket’s successes are now attracting the attention of the biggest names in the business.

And that, after all, is the game Rocket’s playing with its myriad clones. Set up quickly, cut your losses quickly, focus on the wins. Rake in the millions. And repeat.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Facebook’s tactical retreat on privacy

The outfit is repeating its trick of selling new shares to raise more money to fund its new effort there. This time, it is raising £7 million ($10.8 million) by selling 5.6 million new shares (seven percent of the company) to Mirabaud Securities and Liberium Capital.

I calculate Phorm has now raised around £131.56 million since 2005 through 11 rounds of various kinds, but has booked almost no revenue.

Successive share issues have diluted previous investments, but Phorm has also tried to ringfence previous investment by establishing new country-level offshoots through which to raise money. In June, it signed an agreement to raise £20 million to fund a distinct new Chinese spin-off, immediately valuing its fledgling unit alone at a giddy £100 million.

The focus on emerging markets, at least, is wise. Turkey is Europe’s fastest-growing market, displaying the highest page views per user, according to comScore…

Phorm’s technology uses ISPs’ data of their subscribers’ browsing habits to better target ads served through partner publishers. The idea promised to increase advertising rates for publishers and click-throughs for advertisers.

Although the idea was really a more granular version of web cookie-based ad targeting that already goes on, it was met with a privacy outcry. Despite Phorm softening the service offering, three UK ISPs who trialled it decided not to go deploy it. Phorm moved operations to South Korea but the same happened. So it moved to Brazil, where it has signed with ISP Oi. Now it has relocated its HQ from Delaware to Singapore along with the new Chinese focus.

If it can ever prove itself in overseas markets and shake off the initial UK privacy concerns, Phorm could be a very big deal for online advertising – a sector facing shrinking CPMs and in which ad tech like real-time bidding is desperately trying to wring remaining pennies out of digital nooks and crannies.

Phorm signed its fourth ever ISP deal in Turkey in July, with the country’s number-two operator TTNET. The outfit says it is now genuinely serving ads to over one million unique opted-in users.

“The scale of our operations in Turkey represents a significant revenue opportunity for Phorm,” CEO Kent Ertugrul said.

Brazilian user count has doubled since March and commercial activity in Romania will begin soon, Ertugrul said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Will Standardizing the Cloud Cause Clarity or Confusion?
• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past

One day after Philipp Humm’s surprise resignation from T-Mobile, Vodafone announced he has joined its ranks. Humm won’t just be supervising one of Vodafone’s numerous European subsidiaries – he will take charge of eight of them: Germany; the UK; the Netherlands, Turkey, Ireland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania.

That explains Humm’s sudden departure. T-Mobile USA’s parent company Deutsche Telekom is one of Vodafone’s biggest competitors. In fact, by running Vodafone Germany Humm will be going head-to-head with T-Mobile Germany, the DT subsidiary he once led.

Vodafone announced the appointment as part of a larger European reorganization. Vodafone is splitting the continent into two operating regions. Italy CEO Paolo Bertoluzzo will run the second region which encompasses southern Europe and includes Vodafone’s carriers in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Albania, and Malta.

The move is definitely a step up for Humm. While T-Mobile USA is a huge operator by European standards, it’s the smallest of the U.S. Big 4 by far. In several of the countries Humm will be supervising, Vodafone’s carriers are the No. 1 and No. 2 players. He no longer has to assume the role of the scrappy challenger.

Humm won’t assume his new Vodafone mantle until Oct. 1, which is the day after his contract with Deutsche Telekom officially ends. It’s now pretty clear Humm isn’t being punished for his role in the AT&T-Mo debacle. Quite the opposite, he’s being rewarded with an even more important job (albeit by a different company).

That leaves T-Mobile in a bit of turmoil. It needs to scramble to find a permanent CEO while in the process of overhauling its network, launching LTE and executing its new “challenger strategy.” As I wrote yesterday though, the last thing a new T-Mobile CEO should do is try to ‘shake up’ the company, as new chiefs are wont to do. Humm and team had put together a compelling plan to take on T-Mobile’s larger rivals, and whomever winds up running T-Mo should give it a chance to work

Image courtesy of Flickr user LGEPR

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Numbers from AppData confirm that the company is right up there, and according to Peak Games itself, the company now has six million daily active users for its own games and 3.7 million for the third-party games it publishes. That means it trumps Berlin’s Wooga (8.6 million DAUs) and even Electronic Arts (9.1 million).

If you’re still asking who Peak Games are, you probably don’t live in Turkey, the Middle East or North Africa (MENA). The Istanbul-based company, which is only a year-and-a-half old, has many highly successful games in the region, such as Tavla Plus and Pyramidville.

Pyramidville? That would be a clone with an Egyptian twist, right?

“It would be a fair assessment,” co-founder and chief strategy officer Rina Onur told me. “Peak Games is both a developer and a publisher. We’re not just focused on creating titles – our main focus is the region. We’re here to provide any type of game for any type of gamer in this region, so we take successful games from around the world and get publishing rights.”

It’s not a bad strategy. 40 percent of Peak’s users are in the MENA region. If the gamers in that part of the world want a version of Farmville with “Arabic-looking people”, as Onur put it, so be it.

MENA in mind

But it’s Peak’s in-house stuff that’s more interesting, particularly its versions of local classic board games such as Okey. The latest self-developed title was Lost Bubble, which already has two million daily active users – the game was launched in 15 different languages, including Turkish and Arabic.

“The number of gamers from this region is going to increase very significantly, which is enough to take us higher in the rankings,” Onur suggested.

But that’s not to say Peak will be relying entirely on the Middle East and North Africa for growth. On the contrary, Onur revealed plans to “replicate what we’ve been doing in this emerging market region and take it to other regions”, namely south-east Asia, “in the upcoming months”.

The company’s bringing two new faces onto its board to help out with the expansion: angel investor Ali Kutay (former CEO of WebLogic and GoldenGate) and Robert Unsworth (a business development guy, formerly at Digital Chocolate).

Interestingly, Peak is staying away from Latin America at the moment, and that’s largely because Facebook – a key platform for the firm, alongside browser and mobile– is only now taking over from Google’s Orkut. Onur and her firm want to wait for that process to play out, then re-evaluate the scene.

“When it happens, then great, but right now we’re not confident we’d see the user levels or the monetization levels we’re seeing in our market,” she said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Where the next-generation console fits in today’s video game market
• Forecast: the converged mobile messaging market
• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

Announcing its latest financial results, the Moscow-based company said that it beat expectations to post $200 million of revenues, with net income for the first quarter of 2012 up to 1.26 billion rubles ($43 million). That’s 53 percent higher than the same time last year, continuing the company’s growth curve.

But some had already worried that profits were down significantly on the end of 2012, where profit was more than $71 million. And, more importantly, Yandex is slowly losing market share in Russia to Google — with the percentage of searches on Yandex down to 59 percent. A year ago it was riding high at 65 percent.

And that’s had an impact on the company’s stock since it went public last year.

In a call to media and analysts, CEO Arkady Volozh said the drop from the end of last year was largely down to the seasonal trend for a depressed advertising market, and that the company was doing well in lots of new regions as well as remaining strong at home.

“There is still a lot of room for growth,” he said, both in Russia and in other territories — despite the massive growth of Google’s Chrome browser, which gives its Californian rival a leg up in search volumes.

“We sustained the market share and we’re still in the ballpark of 60 percent share, despite serious changes on the distribution front and complete change on the browser front,” said Volozh. “We grew faster than analysts expected last year and we continue to grow faster this year than expected. Finally, our Turkey launch will take a lot of time and effort, but the early results actually encourage us a lot.”

As it looks to boost growth, Yandex has been developing new products — a real-time search partnership with Twitter, for example, and map licensing from Navteq. It’s also broadening its base by moving into the Turkish market, and putting money into seed investment projects.

The markets reacted slowly, however, and as the exchanges opened in New York, the company’s shares were relatively flat.

In part, that’s a settling of sentiment about the company after its public flotation last year, which ended up being one of 2011′s biggest tech IPOs.

But it’s also a recognition of Google’s slow but growing influence in the Russian market. Now responsible for more than a quarter of local searches, Google is — of course — a behemoth compared to Yandex. But as time goes on, many worry that the Mountain View company could bring its considerable financial power to bear on Europe’s biggest internet market.

And given that in the last three months Google made as much profit in 36 hours as Yandex made in the entire quarter, there may be plenty of reason to worry.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies

Madvertise is already the leading mobile ad firm in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Globally, it’s certainly one of the smaller players in an industry dominated by Google and Apple, but it’s looking to at least take over the European market — and the Mobilike buy is part of that plan.

Being Turkish, Mobilike will provide a “beachhead for the entire region,” Madvertise CEO Carsten Frien told me, the region in question being south-eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Although its headquarters are in Berlin, Madvertise already has sales satellites in London, Paris, Milan and Barcelona. According to Frien, the company aims to be European market leader by 2014 — right now, it’s just the biggest firm of that kind that’s headquartered in Europe.

Here’s a graph showing the combined reach of Madvertise and Mobilike, with the former accounting for around 1.7 billion page impressions a month and the latter somewhere north of 300 million:

Of course, buying other companies is only one way to expand. Beyond the tactical move of picking up Mobilike — which has 60 percent market share in Turkey — Madvertise also has another trick up its sleeve.

The company’s about to roll out a real-time bidding platform for mobile ads. This is a trend that’s already taking hold in the general online ad market due to its efficiency and targeting advantages, but that is yet to become dominant in the handset world. Mobclix is doing something similar, but Apple and Google are yet to follow suit.

We’re rolling out the first version in May and the second version in August,” Frien said. “It allows us to take Madvertise as a business into any region of the world. Yes, we’re going into the Middle East with our Turkey acquisition, but our global platform strategy allows us to tackle any market globally.”

Frien was also keen to talk up the engineering focus of his company. He pointed to the kind of regulatory interest that arguably caused Apple to stop using unique device identifiers (UDIDs) as a way of identifying users, noting that Madvertise “anticipated this move” and developed its own way of doing the same thing.

Madvertise’s system identifies the user by correlating around 40 parameters, including the handset model, the installed browser, the site being browsed or the app being used, the carrier and the user’s location.

“We’re doing very innovative stuff and obviously we’re only focused on mobile,” Frien said. “Google and Apple have more resources, but that doesn’t mean they always have the cutting edge across all their products.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Hyperlocal: opportunities for publishers and developers
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look

The event, Kultur Convivio, drew together a range of the continent’s leading lights — some old (such as French firm Partech, which was founded 29 years ago) and some very, very new (at least one investor hadn’t officially finished pulling his first seed fund together).

It was a rare opportunity to get some insight into what is, from the outside at least, a disjointed and sometimes contradictory scene. Here are some things I took away from the event:

These are interesting trends if you play them out over the next five to 10 years — and suggest a few things to me about what we’re going to see down the road.

First, we’ll see Europe’s center of gravity move east. Russia is likely to exert more influence as it grows as a market, but it will also reinforce Germany’s grip on the region: German investors are already moving fast, which will enhance Berlin’s position as a startup hub since it can act as a gateway to Eastern Europe.

Second, we’ll see more businesses that try to become international very quickly (since intra-European exits are poor). At the same time, I think we’ll also see plenty more local clones emerging to try and sell to international businesses looking to move into the European market.

Finally, it’s a cliche — but the financial crisis presents an opportunity too. It will be particularly intriguing to watch what happens in countries like Italy, Greece and Spain, where the local economy is so fragile that entrepreneurship may not just be the best option — it may be the only option.

Photograph used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user David Chief

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past