Russia has its own Palantir
Some instances show the Russians appear to be developing a Foundry copycat
Last week, while trying to find new insights on Palantir and new Foundry links, a completely different thing appeared, a new surprise laid in front of me in the middle of the path. There are a couple of Russian projects I want to talk about here, but I want to begin with what seems to be a Foundry copycat. It’s a project developed by the Samara regional government and with the financial support of the Samara City District Administration.
The project itself is called {OPEN}SAMARA and its primary function is to help visualize different aspects of the lives of their citizens (like health, education, income…) in the form of a temperature map. The resemblance to the Object Explorer tool in Foundry is striking.
But hey, don’t worry. Although imitation is the sincerest form of flattering, as they say, the Russians haven’t put a lot of effort in forming a proper data ingestion system. If the Palantir platforms integrate different data from disparate sources and are able to understand a variety of data languages, the Russians have built their platform on top of what appears to be a questionnaire.
Although other data sources are expected to be connected to it, there’s a webpage linked to the other one’s IP. The following page yields a questionnaire for a citizen to upload information of their own life and family to calculate their government benefits.
It sure does look harmless and part only of a small portion of the Russian Federation, but it also indicates a willingness to have a tool at the very least similar to what the Americans have. It is obvious Foundry inspired {OPEN}SAMARA and for the Russians it’s always been a game of wanting to be like the US.
I’m by no means comparing the capabilities of the 2 platforms, since what Foundry is able to achieve has met no match, yet. But they are taking steps into that direction.
Another piece of information that could be useful to you, dear reader, is what seems to be a login page to “Digital Platform Integrated Monitoring” under the main “Palantiri” link, also with a Soviet Union domain format. I’ll include translated screenshots with a Palantir Foundry example to serve as testament to the inspiration.
At this point I hope no one believes these are mere coincidences, unrelated to each other. They seem to be so obsessed with Palantir they not only copy the theoretical functions one Foundry tool offers (like Object Explorer), but they even type down “palantir” every time they want to open the Soviet opencode link. It’s interesting thinking from the Russians, at the very least.
I’d like to end this by mentioning one last link, one last Russian webpage as a kind of bonus track to this strange Soviet-like Foundry inspired “album”.
It’s called Palantir Meteo, and it looks like a Google Maps but for weather events. And based on their choice of words, maybe its for weather forecast, who knows. I tried to create an account but it looks like I need to be accepted and manually registered… I applied about 4 days ago and got no response… yet. Maybe some day!
Insane. Amazing findings Either!