GBC.AI, provider of cutting-edge proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) smart-blockchain technology, has announced its new Web3 security product, Wallet Guardian.

Over 2 billion people around the world use WhatsApp, and it is the most popular messaging application in Southeast Asia. As the number of people using this app will continue to rise with the growth of digital consumers across the region, brands and businesses will need to better connect and communicate with their customers who are turning to chat with businesses on WhatsApp.

The impact of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine is far-reaching and will impact Asia Pacific in the short and possibly long-term in a recently published impact analysis: IDC reiterates that sanctions, commodity shortages, and higher prices for oil and gas as well as other essential goods will further fuel inflationary pressures and damage ICT supply chains that support the regional consumer electronics and semiconductor manufacturing as well as distribution industries.

As adesso said right at the beginning of the Corona crisis, the stability of long-term forecasts has been completely turned upside down since the pandemic and has led to high volatility in forecasting trends and planning uncertainty for companies.

Reachbird, the influencer marketing agency acquired by adesso last year, has surveyed experts for the fourth time in a row and compiled the most important trends for the new year.

For the last 30 years, Cisco has been powering the internet, keeping the world connected to what matters most. Networks have evolved to detect and react to issues to maintain performance and reliability. The next logical step is for networks to predict problems before they happen, something that has been difficult until now.

The data and artificial intelligence company, ADA, and Treasure Data, a global Customer Data Platform (CDP) company, announced a strategic partnership to bring end-to-end enterprise customer-centric solutions to 10 markets across South and Southeast Asia, including South Korea. This partnership will help enterprises enhance and personalize customer experience to improve the customer journey, communicate efficiently, and manage data gaps.

SIM cards are among the smallest consumer items in the world, weighing around four grams each. However, with approximately 4.5 billion SIM cards manufactured every year, their combined weight represents an estimated 20,000 tons of plastic and other polymers, or the equivalent weight of 4000 jeepneys.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) kicks off the first Domain Name System (DNS) Forum in Asia Pacific (APAC) this week from 30 March to 1 April 2022. ICANN is an international, non-profit organization that coordinates the DNS and plays a key role in ensuring a global, interoperable, and secure Internet.

ICANN regularly invites leading Internet governance practitioners and experts to discuss the future of the Internet's address system at its regional DNS Forums. These gatherings serve as a unique discussion platform for those interested in Internet governance and the domain name space, bringing together a diverse set of participants from industry, government, academia, and civil society.

Together with local hosts, ICANN has presented DNS Forums in Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East since 2014. While the meetings are held in different regions with a focus on local issues, they all serve the same goal: to stimulate knowledge exchange, networking, and discussion about the domain name industry and boost cooperation between ICANN and the global DNS community.

This week's DNS Forum is the first in the Asia Pacific region. Themed "Beyond Technology: The Revolution of the DNS," the event will take place virtually and co-hosted with MYNIC Berhad, the designated country code top-level domain manager for .MY. For more information about the APAC DNS Forum 2022 and to participate, click here.

PropertyGuru announced the appointment of Shyn Yee Ho-Strangas as Managing Director for the Data and Software Solutions (DSS) business. She joins PropertyGuru’s Group Leadership Team and will report to CEO and Managing Director, Hari V Krishnan.

Shyn Yee brings deep domain knowledge in travel and technology, having served online travel company Expedia Group for close to a decade. Most recently as the director of global product management at Expedia Group, Shyn Yee has extensive experience devising strategies and software solutions for enterprise players in the travel space. She has led large teams driving global strategic and cross-functional workstreams, focusing on global market expansion and local optimization.

At PropertyGuru, she will be responsible for driving the vision, strategy, and execution of innovative and game-changing data and software solutions and services, with a focus on enterprise customers in the property sector. Supported by her team within the DSS business unit, Shyn Yee will lead the charge to identify and accelerate opportunities to pursue PropertyGuru’s quest to build the property trust platform in Southeast Asia.

Shyn Yee’s appointment coincides with the Group’s recent listing on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker “PGRU”. The Group also recently announced strong performance that beat forecasted revenue, delivering over S$100m revenue in 2021, a 22.7% increase year-on-year. As Southeast Asia’s #1 digital property marketplace with leading positions in Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, the Group plans to deepen investments in proprietary data and technology to drive greater transparency and efficiency in the property market and create a trusted platform for property seekers, agents, consumers, developers and banks.

Yahoo announced the appointment of Alicin Reidy-Williamson to Chief Diversity & Culture Officer, where she will lead Yahoo’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts globally, in addition to building upon Yahoo’s passionate and positive team culture.

In her role, Reidy-Williamson will report directly to CEO Jim Lanzone, and work closely with leaders at Yahoo to continue to grow a diverse workforce and strengthen policies, practices and business that nurture a culture of inclusion. She will also lead a talented team of DEI and employee experience practitioners, oversee employee engagement and strategic partnerships, and continue to champion accountability across teams, functions and geographies.

For over 25 years, Reidy-Williamson has led Culture, Purpose and DEI for top companies. She previously served as Chief Inclusion Officer at Endeavor, leading inclusion strategies globally across multiple businesses. Prior to Endeavor, she was Managing Principal for The Raben Group, a national public policy and communications strategy firm, where she developed the DEI practice. Reidy-Williamson also spent 13 years at Viacom and MTV Networks, launching the company’s efforts in corporate responsibility, diversity and inclusion, and public affairs, while managing their growth. She will be based in New York.

Big Data Exchange (BDx), Asia Pacific's premier data center, colocation and hybrid cloud solutions provider, announced the relocation of the company's global headquarters to Singapore.

With this relocation, the company plans to continue investing in the Singapore market by creating new career opportunities and increasing its data center offerings and energy effectiveness. Over the next year, BDx will triple its investments in this captive data center and cloud managed services market and increase its Singapore-based regional workforce by 100%. Additionally, BDx's senior leadership presence in Singapore will rise from 20% to 90%, allowing company executives to be more ingrained with Singapore's dynamic technology landscape.

Known as a mini Silicon Valley and the second-largest data center region globally, Singapore's Smart Nation initiative backed by the Government of Singapore sets the stage for digitization across policy processes and urban environments. As a cloud infrastructure, emerging tech and data-driven powerhouse, Singapore is poised for further explosive growth as cloud adoption and digital requirements continue to increase.

With locations spanning APAC's most demanding markets, including Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Nanjing, and its new HQ of Singapore, this move represents BDx's commitment to expanding its global footprint while focusing on one of the world's strongest economic and political landscapes. In addition, as Singapore looks to implement increasingly higher standards for sustainability and restarts data center development, BDx is dedicated to applying its expertise and solutions in sustainable construction, tracking and management for the betterment of the market.

Backed by private equity firm I Squared Capital, BDx has established itself as an award-winning technology and data center partner known for its colocation services and solutions portfolio. The company's SIN1 data center in Singapore, acquired from Telstra, deploys and manages IT infrastructure for multinational enterprises, OTTs and hyperscalers in scalable environments. BDx has been running its data center facility in Singapore since 2020. Its Singapore HQ is set to open in April 2022 and will house the company's innovative staff and leadership team, known as #BDxperts.

Vincent Lau, former MD of one of the strongest exchanges, believes WEB 3.0 infrastructure, DeFi, NFT, GameFi, and Metaverse will be essential parts of the future. With this in mind and weighing the future potential of digital assets, he has resigned as Managing Director of Huobi Global to co-found Naffiti and Wise Venture.

Though the market fluctuates, the crypto and NFT community continue to grow, and there will be more companies focusing on developing NFT. He realizes that NFT is the bridge of the traditional market to the crypto market, this is the start of blockchain and digital currency era. Vincent becomes the investor and co-founder of Naffiti NFT Launchpad and Marketplace and founded his own investment company, Wise Venture (WISE), to support the growth of the blockchain and NFT ecosystem in general. He and his team aim to provide necessary functions that answer the needs of the NFT communities.

Naffiti launchpad helps creators, businesses, and license owners create and market NFT collections and assists them in building communities – without coding knowledge. Naffiti also introduces the two tokens ecosystem where NAFF, the native token, and NAO, the governance token, are introduced and actively used throughout the platform.

Effie Asia Pacific is pleased to introduce Jane Lin-Baden, Managing Partner APAC & CEO North Asia of Publicis Groupe and Vishnu Mohan, Partner & Chief Growth Officer at Dept, as Heads of Jury for the APAC Effie Awards 2022. As Heads of Jury, they will lead the jurors in assessing this year’s entries and honouring the best works to emerge from Asia Pacific.

Based in Shanghai, Jane oversees Publicis Groupe in North Asia (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea & Japan) and is responsible for its digital operations, key accounts and market expansion in the APAC region. She brings over 24 years of experience in digital, technology, communication, start-up and corporate management. Before joining Publicis, Jane was the CEO of Isobar APAC.

Vishnu is currently the Partner & Chief Growth Officer of international digital agency Dept, responsible for scaling up the agency’s operations in Asia Pacific. In addition to this role, he founded Avyan Holdings in 2021, designed to be a collective of companies working towards advancing human possibilities by integrating design, technology, and data to help brands and people thrive in a digital-first world. In his three-decade long career, Vishnu spent more than 25 years with Havas/Vivendi Group, one of the world’s largest media and entertainment companies, working in India, China, Singapore and the UK. He was credited with launching Havas Media network in Asia Pacific, establishing an operation across 18 markets with 2500 employees and leading 12 acquisitions personally. He left the group as its Chairman/CEO for the region in 2021 after successfully driving transformational strategy for the group in important markets, integrating operations as one and leading the development of content IPs, leveraging the entirety of Vivendi’s ecosystem comprising music, gaming, streaming, publishing and films. Vishnu continues to play an active role in the industry as an advisor to multiple companies, board member at industry bodies, juror at multiple awards, diversity & inclusion champion, and advocate of purpose-led work for brands and organisations.

Globally recognised by clients and agencies alike as one of the industry’s most prestigious accolades for marketing effectiveness, the APAC Effie Awards continues to uphold the gold standard by honouring only the most effective works in the region.

Lumen Technologies announced executive appointments for Asia Pacific region.

Annette Murphy has taken on a newly created role as Regional President, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC), and Francis Thangasamy has been promoted to Managing Director, Asia Pacific.

In addition to leading the EMEA region at Lumen, Murphy will now also have executive oversight and responsibility for business results in APAC. A key focus of her role will be to leverage the company's extensive capabilities and skills across the two regions, to optimise customer success for international clients. She will also contribute to global strategy and work closely with the wider organisation, helping Lumen deliver on its commitment to further human progress through technology. Murphy was formerly Managing Director, EMEA at Lumen, having joined the company in April 2021. She previously held a range of executive roles at telecoms companies across EMEA and the US.

In his new role, Thangasamy will be responsible for leading the Lumen Asia Pacific region, including developing and executing the commercial strategy and P&L accountability. He will oversee teams across all go-to-market and operational functions, including sales, marketing, and customer success. Thangasamy has been with Lumen since 2007 in a variety of senior management positions, most recently as Vice President, Product, Marketing and Operations. During his tenure he has driven various transformation initiatives and forged several strategic partnerships to advance the business. He has more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry.

Yahoo announced an APAC-wide partnership with Near, one of the world’s largest sources of privacy-led intelligence on people, places and products.

This alliance brings together the strengths of Near’s unique location intelligence data with Yahoo’s omnichannel demand-side platform (DSP) and suite of identity solutions for cookieless advertising.

This partnership builds on the year-long alliance between Yahoo and Near in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), which delivered strong results for Yahoo’s clients in that region. It will integrate Near’s privacy-by-design data set of people's behavior in the real world and its AI solutions into Yahoo’s DSP, complementing Yahoo’s suite of identity solutions – Yahoo ConnectID and Next-Gen Solutions.

In an increasingly omnichannel world, where consumers routinely move between online channels and offline environments, marketers continue to deal with fragmentation of their customer view across channels, between online engagement and real-world store visits.

Yahoo's APAC partnership with Near will bring a unified view to bridge the gap in online and offline targeting, attribution and measurement, solving a key pain point for marketers. Brands can now measure all digital marketing delivered via Yahoo’s ad platforms, regardless of the channel or creative, against online engagement or store traffic, within the same campaign. This benefit will be critical for advertisers to identify incremental audiences and craft the right channel mix as they connect the dots in omnichannel audience activation and campaigns.

The location-based targeting and measurement solutions and Near’s data set are now available for activation in the Yahoo DSP across APAC, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and India.

Bounty Media announces that it has won first place in Procter & Gamble Thailand's search for bleeding edge innovation addressing the Ad world's search for a solution to the current consumer data challenge. 

Bounty's introduction to Thailand this week marks the start of their Southeast Asia and greater APAC rollout through 2022 & 2023, expanding their content partners with a target of 1 billion users by the end of 2023.  

The DataTech company with a zero-party deep data platform, has been founded by Claes Loberg and Jake Denney in Singapore in late 2019. Unlike first-party and third-party data, zero-party data is consent-based personal context data that customers intentionally share with a brand they trust.

In the wake of data privacy concerns, Google announced that it will end behavioral targeting and profile-building in its ad products, following the footsteps of Apple and Mozilla, which have been phasing out third-party cookies. This leaves opportunities for an evolution in advertising tech that's built on trust and transparency. Currently, Bounty Media partners include leading News, Telco, Games and OTT partners such as Viu, Vidio & UseeTV in Indonesia to serve a collective 92m monthly active users.

Palo Alto Networks, a global cybersecurity leader, released its predictions for the cybersecurity trends that will shape the digital landscape for the year ahead.

According to a recent study, corporate communications managers consider social media one of the biggest business risks, ahead of privacy and cyber threats, extreme weather conditions or supply chain problems.

The APWG's new Phishing Activity Trends Report reveals that the number of phishing attacks has tripled from early 2020. APWG observed 316,747 phishing attacks in December 2021, which is the highest number since APWG start in 2004.

VoicePing, a Japan-based start-up established in 2019, focuses on developing and providing intuitive, realistic virtual experiences, including virtual office environments. As demand for immersive digital experiences grows, the company started actively developing a variety of VR-related services through a capital and business alliance with MetaReal Corp.

The buzzwords AI and machine learning are on everyone's lips these days, especially in marketing, but are often wrongly used as synonyms. In fact, only about one in five marketers know the differences between the two terms.