Computer users can now access the Internet at Kyiv’s main post office on Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Kyiv’s division of Ukrposhta – the state postal service – opened an Internet cafe at 22 Khreshchatyk on Oct. 18.
Even Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who last summer admonished state agencies to take a greater role in developing the Internet, was on hand for the opening.
Mykola Mashyna, Ukrposhta’s deputy director for technological development, said the cafe’s 13 computers are hooked to the Internet via a 256 kilobyte per second connection supplied by Infocom, a Kyiv-based state Internet service provider.
Each of the computers are equipped with the latest hardware and software, including components such as microphones and speakers.
The rates are Hr 10 an hour. There are currently at least two dozen privately run Internet cafes in Kyiv charging between Hr 4 and Hr 10 for hourly access.
“We are currently considering the possibility of opening similar Internet cafes in other Ukrposhta post offices,” Mashyna said. “This is an experiment.”
According to Mashyna, the project was co-sponsored by the State Communications Committee.
Mashyna would not reveal the cost of the state-financed project.
The opening of the new Internet cafe comes months after a presidential decree issued in July, when Kuchma called upon state agencies to come up with a plan to foster the development of the country’s underdeveloped Internet.
According to the State Statistics Committee, about 500,000 Ukrainians currently have access to the Internet. Industry experts expect this figure to increase to at least 2 million by the end of 2002.
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UkrSat – a Kyiv-based Internet service provider specializing in Internet satellite connection – has begun the second phase of a program that hooks the country’s regional schools to the Web for free.
According to Viktoria Yakovleva, deputy director of UkrSat, the company has already provided free Internet access to about 300 schools in Ukraine’s cities through it’s “Youth Generation – Into the 21st Century” program started in March 1999, but the newest wave of schools to be connected will be in the country’s rural regions.
“It’s common knowledge that the regions have very little access to information and funding in general,” she said, adding that unlike most city-based schools, virtually none of the regional schools in the country have been connected.
“The next school to be connected is located [just south of Kyiv] in the ancient city of Trepilya,” she added.
Yakovleva said that the company has recently hooked up the Hermanivka school located 63 kilometers outside Kyiv and is currently helping to connect a school in Obukhiv – also not far outside Kyiv – by upgrading a local Internet Cafe with a faster connection. The school does not have its own computers.
The goal of the project, she says, is to ensure that the country’s children get a modern education so they can “raise Ukraine to a new level.”
UkrSat also provides computer and Internet training for teachers, Yakovleva said.
She would not reveal the cost of the project.
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SputnikMedia.Net, the Internet spin-off of KP Publications (publishers of the Kyiv Post), announced Oct 13 that its free e-mail Web site www.gomail.com.ua registered it’s 10,000th user.
According to company representatives, Elena Tverdokhleb will receive a free Siemens C25 mobile phone and Hr 500 in free minutes.
SputnikMedia.Net also announced two new competitions. In one, four newly registered users will win a one-year subscription to the Russian-language business journal Biznes. In another, every 50,000th user will receive a valuable prize.
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Yahoo! Inc. announced Oct. 12 that third-quarter profits for its world-famous www.yahoo.com Web portal have more than doubled to $81.1 million compared to the same period last year. Its revenues also jumped 90 percent to $295.5 billion.
Company representatives also reported that unique hits on the Web site increased in September to 166 million compared to 156 million in June.
