We sat down with Yeo Teck Guan, Chief Business Technology Officer of Singapore Pools to dive more into this topic. Singapore Pools is piloting the use of video analytics in two of its outlets to drive greater engagements for community messages and causes. Teck Guan shares these valuable insights with us in an intimate chat.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit more about Singapore Pools Community Programme?

A: We regard giving back to community a core part of our business. Since the inception of iShine community programme in 2003, we have supported a diverse range of programmes committed to different causes, uplifting lives and communities.
As we digitalise our business operations, we remain cognizant of the needs of many charities which might not have the resources to do so. Hence, we leverage our technological expertise to set up iShine Cloud in 2018, to provide charities with an affordable and integrated suite of charity-specific solutions via a secure cloud-based IT platform.

Q: How is Singapore Pools looking to improve their outreach efforts through digitalisation?

A: Traditionally, one of the ways that we support community outreach programmes is by leveraging our strong retail network to display posters and other print materials. It is unclear how effective such were as this communication was unidirectional with no feedback available. As we revitalize our retail network with digital solutions, we have enhanced the space with digital wall displays to deliver more engaging video content of our charity partners. We next want to take it a step further by using video analytics to achieve 2-way feedback for our community messages such as how many people are looking at the message and their level of interest, while maintaining their privacy and no personal data is being collected. . With such non-specific information, we can then assess how to better design content such as videos or images to improve outcomes for the charities.

Q: How is Singapore Pools working with SPTel to pilot such efforts?

A: Such an endeavour would require responsive compute resources to quickly capture and perform the analytics we need. That is why we are piloting the programme on SPTel’s edge cloud to process and store all that data from multiple outlets at their edge cloud locations. By leveraging the nearest edge cloud, we can serve multiple outlets at once without having to set up servers at each location.