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Steve Jobs Monument Planned in Novosibirsk

Jobs, right, with then-President Dmitry Medvedev in June 2010.

Devotees of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs in Novosibirsk are planning to install a monument to him in the form of a live apple tree equipped with sensors that can connect to smart phones.

Project founder Daria Zhdanova said she and the other authors of the project wanted it to be different from typical monuments.

"It should be something original — alive, simple, understandable and open to people," Zhdanova told Interfax on Friday.

She told the news agency that they want to plant a Macintosh apple tree — the variety represented in Apple's logo — and surround it with a casing in the shape of a light bulb. This casing will be lit up from within and will contain sensors that will be able to send people ideas and quotations of Jobs, most likely via an application on smart phones.

The monument likely won't become a tourist attraction in the Siberian city, however, as the project founders want to install it in a new IT building within the Akadempark technology park outside the city center.

Apple products, especially the iPhone, are hugely popular in Russia, and prominent politicians including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev paid tribute to Jobs when he died last October.

The coordinators of the Novosibirsk monument project have collected just over 60,000 rubles ($1,939) toward its installation, according to a crowd-funding web page dedicated to the project.

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