An amazing abstract mathematical method developed by Russian academician Zhuravlyov can be applied to virtually any market, from cellular communications to retail trade. Forecsys Co., one of the prizewinners in the most recent Russian Innovations Competition, could be called the electronic Cassandra. Forecsys’ software easily determines which bank is reliable and which isn’t, which cellular customers will jump to another service, which supermarket shoppers will like a new product, which candidate voters in a certain region will vote for, and which traders at the stock exchange will go bear. However, unlike the mythological Greek seer, the software uses a mathematical tool devised by academician Yury Ivanovich Zhuravlyov and his students to see into the future, not mystical illuminations. Forecsys’s technology is based on a mathematical theory which was published in full in Soviet and foreign scientific journals about 15-20 years ago. Yet, since then nobody except a few dozen disciples of Zhuravlyov has succeeded in mastering this math in Russia or anywhere else in the world. The method is extremely difficult but works extremely easily and quickly, leaving its competitors in the dust. “It’s like two cars, one automatic and one stick shift,” explains Konstantin Rudakov, one of Zhuravlyov’s followers and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “The automatic is much more complicated but is much easier to use.”