Snap Inc. announced that it has hired its first employee in Singapore underlining its commitment to Southeast Asia.

Anubhav Nayyar will be part of the International Markets team, led by its Managing Director, Nana Murugesan.

The camera company and creators of multimedia messaging app Snapchat, believes that reinventing the camera represents the greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate, aiming to contribute to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together.

The International Markets team is responsible for Snap’s growth strategy, expanding company operations in key global markets, driving cultural relevance, and building its community with a range of programs and local partnerships including with telecom providers and OEMs. Anubhav will lead Snap’s efforts across the Southeast Asia region.

Prior to joining Snap, Anubhav spent seven years at calling and messaging app Viber where he was the Senior Director & Head of Asia Pacific. Anubhav was Viber’s first regional employee and was responsible for establishing it as a leading messaging app in multiple countries in Asia as well as setting up operations across the region.

Snap plans to open an office in Singapore later this year. The company is monitoring the global COVID-19 pandemic and follows local guidance by encouraging remote working. Once the situation eases, the company will accelerate plans to establish a local presence.

The Southeast Asia region has grown in importance for the company over the past 12 months and Snap has undertaken a number of initiatives:

• Localised Augmented Reality (AR) Lenses and creative tools across Southeast Asia, including holidays like Chinese New Year, Thaipusam, Vesak Day, and Kartini Day as well as event such as Java Jazz festival and Football Association of Malaysia matches against Thailand and Indonesia
• Provided promotional offers and strategic partnerships with OEMs such as Vivo and telecom providers, including Indosat and Maxis
• Conducted multiple beginner Lens Studio workshops at local secondary schools and universities including Sunway and Taylor’s universities in Malaysia and The University of Indonesia to support the development of AR skills in the region
• Held intermediate workshops, monthly virtual and in-person meet-ups, and ongoing mentorship for AR Lens creators, and an online course tailored for the region hosted with OpenLearning for developers and AR enthusiasts to advance their Lens Studio skills
• Verified local Snap Stars across fitness, music, fashion, and lifestyle categories to create locally relevant content

The Singapore office also strengthens Snap’s support for its multinational brand advertising partners based in the APAC region.

EASTWEST Public Relations has successfully completed 25 years in Asia, after establishing the company in Singapore in June 1995. The privately-held agency was founded by International PR pioneer Jim James exactly 25 years back servicing B2B clients, expanding after Singapore to China and India. The mission of the PR firm has always been to ‘add value with every communication ’and it has done so for over 500 clients in Asia. The Agency has transitioned to offering digital support and has embraced the ‘everywhere, virtually ’on-demand agency organization structure. EASTWEST PR is still providing high-quality international consultancy as it has since 1995 but is now using the technology within the business that it has spent 25 years promoting.

Today, James has opened the ‘everywhere, virtually ’office of EASTWEST Public Relations in the UK to provide international communication services. The return to the UK marks the 4th phase of growth in the evolution of EASTWEST Public Relations. The first phase was to open Singapore, the second to open China, third India and now Europe. During the expansion, James has travelled extensively and gained experience of building International and diverse teams across the region and serving both international and local clients mainly with the B2B sectors and education. His agency operates on geography independent, knowledge-driven basis using a network of partners and consultants in a country which allows for flexibility and cost savings for clients. With legal entities in multiple jurisdictions, a well-known brand amongst the media established work processes, and unified technology platform, James no longer engages a permanent workforce for delivery. Clients will find EASTWEST PR an affordable, efficient and effective alternative to large staff-laden networks with overheads to maintain and staff retention to consider. In the ‘on-demand model’, consultants bid for the work that is available to ensure that clients have consultants working on their account who are keen to deliver results because their next job depends on their performance of this one.

EditShare, a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions for media creation and management, has expanded its APAC operations to include a new office in Singapore, led by EditShare’s newly appointed Vice President of Sales for APAC, Alan Dishington.

With strategic oversight of the region’s sales professionals, channel partners, and key accounts, Alan will steer EditShare’s business success with an emphasis on customer enablement and experience. Through his vast experience leading business development for Tivo, Accenture and Cisco across the region, Alan brings a deep understanding of the media industry and its trajectory towards cloud-based solutions to the EditShare APAC sales operation.

In addition to the appointment of Alan, EditShare is expanding its on-the-ground presence with the addition of Tze Ming Ng, in the role of regional sales manager, and William Tay, in the role of pre-sales engineer for APAC. These new roles will support EditShare's growing customer base in the region, which includes media giant Tencent Video, the Beijing Film Academy, and NHK, as well as the region's growing demand for remote production solutions.”

Tze Ming brings to EditShare vast experience in business development with special focus on media and cloud solution sales, having led similar roles for companies including NTT, InfoFabric, Pebble Beach Systems and The Media Village.

William comes to EditShare with experience in system integration, support, and delivery as well as training, working for Mediagenix NG, Software Generation Limited, and Avid.

Establishing EditShare’s new Singapore office as a regional hub comes on the heels of its resource expansion into China with on the ground presence in Beijing and technology advancements deploying EditShare customer workflows to run in Tencent Cloud, one of Asia’s biggest cloud providers.

The appointments of Alan Dishington, Tze Ming and William Tay are effective immediately.

NetApp, the leader in cloud data services, announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Spot, a leader in compute management and cost optimization on the public clouds, to establish leadership in Application Driven Infrastructure (ADI).

Application Driven Infrastructure translates the application’s workload patterns and drives the best possible level of performance and cost for storage and compute, all done while maintaining the contracted service-level agreement (SLA) and service-level objective (SLO).

Spot provides a combination of tools for visibility and automation that drive continuous optimization of workloads in a single platform while maintaining both SLA and SLO. This relieves DevOps, CloudOps, and FinOps teams from the burden and complexity of managing, scaling, tuning and optimizing cloud resources so that they can focus on business innovation under acceptable budget controls.

Together, NetApp and Spot will establish an Application Driven Infrastructure to enable customers to deploy more applications to public clouds faster with Spot’s “as-a-service" platform for the continuous optimization of both compute and storage for both traditional IT buyers with enterprise applications, cloud-native workloads and data lakes.

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of NetApp’s fiscal year and is subject to the satisfaction of certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.