Day: June 29, 2021

Tech Industry Veteran to Lead Expansion of Zoom’s APAC Business

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZM) today announced Ricky Kapur will join the company as the Head of APAC, effective June 21. Reporting directly to Zoom’s Head of International Abe Smith, Kapur will define and lead the company’s go-to-market strategy for key APAC markets: Australia and New Zealand, ASEAN, China, Hong Kong SAR, India, Korea, and Taiwan — exclusive of Japan. Ricky will manage Zoom’s APAC business with supervision and alignment across all cross-functional roles.

Kapur comes to Zoom after five and a half years at Microsoft, where he was most recently Vice President of Sales and Marketing Operations for APAC. At Microsoft, he managed all segments, from SMB, Majors through Enterprise, and led a cross-functional team of sales, marketing, partner, and customer success professionals. Zoom is positioned for continued growth in APAC, and to capitalize on these new opportunities, it has expanded its leadership to lead the company through its next phase of expansion in the region.

“Zoom has scaled its operations and business impressively across APAC markets, announcing a Technology Center in India and a Research and Development Center in Singapore within the past year,” said Ricky Kapur, Head of APAC at Zoom. “I am excited to join a company that continues to redefine the way organizations and individuals connect, from breaking barriers for education and healthcare with virtual-learning and telehealth to becoming critical technology for enterprises as they quickly evolved and adapted to a hybrid working model.”

“We are thrilled to have Ricky Kapur lead our go-to-market strategy for all of APAC, a region where we are seeing accelerated growth,” said Abe Smith, Head of International at Zoom. “APAC is a critical region for Zoom, as we invest in infrastructure and expand the presence of our sales, marketing, and research and development teams to best enable organizations of all sizes with seamless and reliable video communications.”

About Ricky Kapur
Ricky Kapur is Head of APAC for Zoom, bringing over 25 years of experience to his role. Prior to joining Zoom, Kapur was Vice President of Sales and Marketing Operations at Microsoft APAC. In his role, he managed all segments, from SMB and Majors up to Enterprise and led a cross-functional team of Sales, Marketing, Partner and Customer Success and Operations professionals. Before joining Microsoft, Kapur served as Managing Director at Google where he was responsible for overseeing growth of Google Cloud Platform across APJ. Prior to that, Kapur held the position of Vice President, ASEAN Technology Sales at Oracle. He also worked at Siebel Systems, Unica Corporation, and Chordiant Software. Kapur is a chartered accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in India and holds an MBA from the University of Melbourne.

About Zoom
Zoom is for you. We help you express ideas, connect to others, and build toward a future limited only by your imagination. Our frictionless communications platform is the only one that started with video as its foundation, and we have set the standard for innovation ever since. That is why we are an intuitive, scalable, and secure choice for individuals, small businesses, and large enterprises alike. Founded in 2011, Zoom is publicly traded (NASDAQ:ZM) and headquartered in San Jose, California. Visit zoom.com and follow @zoom.

Zoom Public Relations
Hayley Yap
APAC PR Lead
press@zoom.us

Digiday awards Best Publisher Platform to Sophi.io, a suite of artificial intelligence-powered automation, optimization and prediction tools developed by The Globe and Mail

TORONTO, June 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Sophi.io, The Globe and Mail’s artificial intelligence-based automation and prediction engine, won the 2021 Digiday Media Award for Best Publisher Platform, which recognizes technology that is most successful in helping publishers achieve their goals.

“AI is an essential technology for helping publishers add authentic value to stories — extending their measure of success beyond page views and virality. For example, Sophi is able to provide data on how much each article on The Globe and Mail contributes to subscriber retention, acquisition, registration potential and advertising dollars. Additionally, to effectively deploy machine learning, around 10% of The Globe and Mail’s workforce is now data scientists and engineers, hired to develop Sophi and grow the strategy even further,” Digiday said.

The awards honour companies, technologies and campaigns that have stood out throughout the media over the past year. “This year, the competition was fierce and the programs robust. Innovation and big ideas expanded the playing field for many of the winners, even in a year when quarantines limited where and how people could work — and play,” according to Digiday.

Phillip Crawley, Publisher and CEO of The Globe and Mail, commented: “It’s an honour to be chosen as the winner of Digiday’s Media Award for Best Publisher Platform. We aren’t often up against companies in both the media and marketing industries but our investments in Sophi have been driven by the understanding that our technology can directly drive performance and economic growth for companies across a large range of industries.”

The other finalists in the Best Publisher Platform category were: Piano, Connatix, Insticator, Duration Media and Adapex LLC.

Sophi is an artificial-intelligence system that helps publishers identify and leverage their most valuable content. It has powerful predictive capabilities – using natural language processing, Sophi Dynamic Paywall is a fully dynamic, real-time, personalized paywall engine that analyses both content and user behaviour to determine when to ask a reader for money or an email address, and when to leave them alone.

Sophi Site Automation autonomously curates digital content to find and promote the most valuable articles. It places 99% of the content on all of The Globe and Mail’s digital pages, including its homepage and section pages. Sophi has been so successful that it is now being used for print laydown as well. Sophi is available to publishers across the globe to enable their content producers to focus on creating the best content possible.

Earlier this month, Sophi won the 2021 International News Media Association (INMA) Global Media Awards for Best in Show in North America and Best Use of Data to Automate or Personalize. Sophi has also won the Online Journalism Award (OJA) for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism, handed out by the Online News Association (ONA), and both the World Digital Media Award and the North American Digital Media Award awarded by The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) in the category of Best Digital News Start-up.

About Sophi.io

Sophi.io (https://www.sophi.io) is a suite of AI-powered optimization and prediction tools that helps content publishers make important strategic and tactical decisions. Sophi solutions range from Sophi Site Automation and Sophi for Paywalls to Sophi Analytics, a decision-support system for content publishers. Sophi is designed to improve the metrics that matter most to any business, such as subscriber retention and acquisition, engagement, recency, frequency and volume.

Contact

Jamie Rubenovitch
Head of Marketing, Sophi.io
The Globe and Mail
416-585-3355
jrubenovitch@globeandmail.com