To help users better manage their emails, the Yandex.Mail team developed a new feature that more easily manages and filters users’ unwanted subscription emails.  Yandex has integrated machine learning algorithms into the platform to determine which emails are coming from subscription services and can tell which emails from the same sender are relevant to users.

Yandex is thrilled to announce a new annual award for students and faculty in computer science and related fields, named after Ilya Segalovich, Yandex co-founder and creator of Yandex search.  This award honors Ilya’s commitment to supporting education and his philanthropic pursuits and introduces a new Yandex education initiative to encourage the study of computer science.

Last week, Yandex’s self-driving car navigated the public streets of Las Vegas during CES 2019 without an operator behind the steering wheel.  Our car safely delivered dozens of passengers to and from the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino to demonstrate the latest advancements of our self-driving technology and the scalability to operate the vehicle against new traffic conditions in Las Vegas.

Yandex recently joined the License on Transfer (LOT) Network and the Open Invention Network (OIN), two organizations committed to innovation and combating aggressive actions by patent assertion entities (PAEs), more commonly known as “patent trolls.”  As a company that develops innovative technologies and believes in a fair and competitive environment, Yandex is happy to join other tech firms in preventing patent issues that undermine the basic principles of innovation.

Yandex is operating a self-driving car in Las Vegas with just a safety engineer in the front passenger seat (NVO Mode).  The company will be providing demonstration rides of its self-driving car on the public streets of Las Vegas starting from the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino during CES 2019.

Today we are excited to announce that Yandex has obtained permission from the Israeli Ministry of Transportation and Road Safety to operate its self-driving car on public roads. The car is now officially approved to operate in autonomous mode with a safety engineer in the driver’s seat.  Following extensive public road testing in Russia and most recently, in the US, this new location marks the third country where Yandex is testing its self-driving vehicles.  Yandex is also one of the first companies to operate self-driving cars in Israel.

There has recently been a lot of news coverage regarding tech companies in the US and globally and their partnerships with Facebook.  We wanted to explain the nature of our former partnership with Facebook to help our users better understand the dynamics and to ensure our users that we are deeply committed to protecting their privacy.

This was a big year for Yandex.Music, as we expanded to three new countries (Armenia, Uzbekistan, and Israel) and our streaming service became available through new platforms, like our Yandex.Station smart speaker and Yandex.Phone.  Yandex.Music provides over 20 million listeners in six countries with access to tens of millions of tracks. As 2018 comes to a close, we wanted to take a look at what our users on Yandex.Music have been listening to the most over the past year.  We’ve looked at stats for each country and found a few key trends that stand out.  The Yandex.Music experts found the most popular artists for each market, as well as the most streamed foreign and Russian-language artists.

In early September, we announced the launch of our intelligent public cloud platform, Yandex.Cloud.  The first phase of our launch included organizations that requested access to the platform and the companies that started using Yandex.Cloud during the initial test period.  After this preliminary rollout period, we are excited to announce that Yandex.Cloud is now available for all enterprise users in Russia.

Today, Yandex announced the release of its first smartphone, Yandex.Phone.  This device is the first phone to be fully powered by our intelligent assistant, Alice, and it is the first smartphone to be entirely integrated into the Yandex mobile ecosystem of apps and services right out of the box.  We’re excited to provide mobile users with the best Yandex smartphone experience.

Yandex is excited to announce that we have received a license to operate our self-driving car in the state of Nevada.  With this autonomous vehicle license, we will be demoing our self-driving car on the public roads of Las Vegas during the week of CES 2019.  From Monday, January 7th until Friday, January 11th, we will be providing rides in our self-driving car for the first time outside of Russia.

Almost 20 years ago in 2000, Yandex launched its first group of services beyond search and search advertising.  In addition to news and email offerings, we introduced our first products designed to help users find goods sold online and in stores.  In 2002, we officially launched our comparison shopping platform Yandex.Market, offering books, films, cosmetics, footwear, clothing, stationery, and toys from 150 e-commerce sites.  Today, Yandex.Market serves over 20 million monthly users, offering them over 160 million goods from over 21,000 sites.

Yandex this week unveiled two new third-party smart speakers integrated with our intelligent assistant, Alice.  The IRBIS A and DEXP Smartbox compact smart speakers will be available exclusively from two of the largest consumer electronics retailers in Russia, M.Video and DNS.  The devices will retail for 3290 rubles ($50).

Today, Yandex announced the latest update for its search engine.  The “Andromeda” update has been rolled out by the Yandex search team over the last year and has included over one thousand improvements and features.  The most notable of these features are an enhanced "quick answers" functionality, along with providing users an easy way to recognize reliable sources and giving users a visual way to save searches with Yandex.Collections. 

At Yandex, we have had the opportunity to play a major role in the way Russian users adopt new technologies and services to better navigate their daily routines.  Our expansion into food tech is no exception.  In February, we launched the Yandex.Eats food delivery service, which connects users with restaurants in a growing number of cities across Russia.  Yandex.Eats is helping to add new and innovative ways for Russian consumers to enjoy their meals.

A year ago, Yandex launched its intelligent assistant, Alice, equipped with advanced conversational abilities that uniquely enable users to engage in free-flowing chit-chat.  Alice was first available through our search app, connecting users with many core Yandex services to help navigate their daily routines.  Some of the original services included Search, News, Weather, and Music.  Today, 30 million people use Alice every month on multiple platforms, and the assistant has become more useful and fun through the addition of thousands of new skills.  In honor of one year in production, we wanted to share an update on Alice's growth.

On August 28, 2018, Yandex.Taxi unveiled Europe's first autonomous ride-hailing service in the tech hub of Innopolis, Russia. Today we are excited to announce that, in just two months, our self-driving cars in Innopolis have completed 1,000 autonomous rides with passengers!

Today marks the seventh anniversary of our ride-hailing service, Yandex.Taxi.  On October 26, 2011, we launched a new service supported by our world-class machine learning and mapping technologies to improve the Moscow taxi market.  Since then, Yandex.Taxi has expanded to over a dozen countries, and we recently reached a major milestone for our service.

As the quality and resolution of the screens in our homes and pockets reaches ever higher levels, the comparatively lower quality of photos and videos made decades ago becomes more obvious.  Here at Yandex, the Computer Vision team within our Machine Intelligence and Research Division has developed a neural-network based super-resolution technology, DeepHD, to help bring these media classics into the digital age. DeepHD enhances the quality of both photos and videos and with its application to Yandex images and content hosted on our video and TV streaming services, it is the first technology of its kind in production.