Neil Ashe

Amazon.com grew its international sales by 44 percent during the third quarter to $4.94 billion, driven in part by the launch of the Spanish language site Amazon.es and a French Kindle store. And the Seattle online retailer still has some growing to do overseas. But Walmart isn’t ceding that market just yet.

Today, the Arkansas retailer announced that it hired a veteran of CBS Interactive as CEO of Walmart’s global e-commerce unit. Neil Ashe, the 44-year-old former head of CBS.com, CNET, CBSSports.com and other CBS Web properties, is taking over the position from Eduardo Castro-Wright who is resigning.

“E-commerce is a great opportunity for us and we have a long-term vision to win,” said Mike Duke, Walmart’s president and CEO, in a statement. “We are on track to create the next generation of e-commerce, combining the latest in online innovations with physical stores to give our customers a unique and seamless shopping experience.”

Now, here’s one interesting twist on the appointment. Ashe sits on the board of LivingSocial, the online daily deal site bankrolled by, you guessed it, Amazon.com.

That could get kind of the interesting. In an interview with All Things D today, Ashe said that Amazon is “very innovative and strategically adept.” It will be his job to try to outmaneuver them.

Candace Grisdale

Symform, the Seattle cloud storage and backup service, has named Chris Boscolo as vice president of engineering and Candace Grisdale as vice president of worldwide sales.

Boscolo previously served as CTO of Napera Netwrks, and before that was the chief software architect at WatchGuard Technologies. Grisdale previously worked at DocuSign, Sesame Communications and Microsoft.

Symform, which named former DocuSign CEO Matthew Schiltz as CEO in June, is backed by OVP Venture Partners and Longworth Venture Partners.

Portland-based Tripwire has named Alex Thurber as vice president of sales. Thurber — who founded Portland’s Thurber Technology Group in 1991 — previously worked at McAfee and Cisco. Tripwire is a provider of IT security products.

Todd Dean, the former president of the Seattle angel group the Keiretsu Forum, has been named president of Open4Sale.com, an e-commerce startup with operations in the U.S. and Australia.

Vivek Kundra, the former chief information officer of the U.S. government, has joined Salesforce.com as executive vice president of emerging markets. “Salesforce.com is an industry disruptor, helping organizations use the transformative power of technology for change,” said Kundra in a statement. “I am excited to join the most innovative company in the world that is pioneering social, mobile and open cloud computing technologies for the enterprise.”

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