More than 30,000 tech specialists now work in Minsk, a city of about two million, many of them creating mobile apps that are used by more than a billion people in 193 countries.One of the Minsk techies is Dmitri Kovalyov, 35, an artist who a couple of years ago worked for MSQRD, a smartphone tool that lets people superimpose various masks over their faces in selfie videos. In 2016, Mr. Kovalyov couldn't imagine that his respect for Leonardo DiCaprio's acting and environmental activism would get the company very far.But before that year's Academy Awards, Mr. Kovalyov and his colleagues developed a tool for a mask that made people in video messages look like Mr. DiCaprio holding two Oscar statuettes.Numerous celebrities tried it out, including on the red carpet, and even Mr. DiCaprio's mother was in on the trick. When a journalist asked her about the app, she said her son had already shown her how it worked. Ten days after the awards, Facebook bought the company for an undisclosed sum.One of the first masks the company developed was one resembling Aleksandr G Lukashenko, Belarus's president, who has ruled for more than two decades.Lukashenko's mask featured his trademark comb-over hair and bushy mustache, but was not considered offensive. On the contrary, Lukashenko began to believe that the tech industry could become a magic wand to help him end the country's chronic dependency on Russia.Lukashenko, who once called the internet “a pile of garbage,“ began to utter improbable words for a former manager of a collective farm -about the need to develop artificial intelligence, driverless cars and blockchain technology, which allows multiple parties to keep shared digital records.

Source: Economic Times October 06, 2017 04:07 UTC