
Russia's Top Web Startups of 2011 Mostly Rip Off U.S.'s - FluidDjango
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/russias_top_5_web_startups_of_2011_mostly_rip_off.php
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shocks
How can Cut The Rope be a "Russian Rip-off" of Angry Birds? They're completely
different, unless we're counting the fact that they feel like solid and
professionally developed games.

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Geee
This was such a stupid comparison and Angry Birds is from Finland too.

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vectorpush
More power to them, they are filling a need that is generally unserviced by an
English speaking hegemony. Yeah, there are some rip offs, but imitation of
popular brands is nothing new.

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guard-of-terra
Biglion screenshot is photoshopped. Anyone can confirm that by visiting
<http://biglion.ru/> and comparing it with the image in the article. It IS a
groupon clone, but why lie?

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sologoub
Yeah, looks like hour-glass clock is not there and a few other minor things...
bug all-in-all it's a clone with almost exact color scheme, identical call to
action buttons on the actual offer.

Being from Moscow originally (10 years ago), it saddens me that so much
creative potential there is being channelled into crappy imitations. Main
problem they have is that people with money most often don't get innovation
and lack of confidence in "tomorrow" drives people to look for easiest ways to
make a few $$$ now instead of creating sustainable and original business
models.

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guard-of-terra
Define crappy? Biglion has huuuge traffic (alexa #723 as we speak) and it's
now arguably coupon service #1 in Russia. Moreover, the problems its customers
might have with this site do not revolve around its design being similar to
that of Groupon.

The nature of the internet is that there is usually only one global winner.
Compare worldwide search (Google is bigger than everybody else combined) with
worldwide car makers (10+ big names of comparable size, local brands in many
countries). That one global winner tends to be an US-based megacorp. Given
that, a country has exactly two choices. First one is let those megagiants
colonize the local market, harnessing all the profits and then maybe opening
some local offices someday; second one is try to fend off the global number
ones and develop own services controlling the same business model slots,
understanding that these local players would not be very different from a
global player (either by cloning like VKontakte or by converging like Yandex),
and that the global megacorp would probably be overally more advanced
(counterexample is south korea where local services run circles around clumsy
google in the terms of tech).

Doing the first way you submit all your market to US megacorps and then try to
fit in some original, tiny but global, business niche (since all the big slots
would already be taken). So I applaud that Russia could go the second way, for
sure.

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dimitar
Don't all startups don't rip off from each other?

