Sleep Crisis in Southeast Asia: Almost 3 in 4 Southeast Asians are not getting a good night’s sleep

While a deep slumber may help prevent memory loss or the onset of Alzheimer’s disease for older adults, it seems that almost 3 in 4 Southeast Asians are experiencing sleep problems. Milieu Insight, Southeast Asia's leading consumer research firm, has released a sleep tracker study revealing that 46% in Southeast Asia face sleep problems at least a few times a week, with the highest prevalence observed in the Philippines (56%). Several sleep problems are more common among Thais, including excessive daytime sleepiness (46%) and increased movement during sleep (40%). Additionally, the study highlights that 59% of individuals in Southeast Asia sleep for less than seven hours.

The most common sleep problems that respondents picked were: “difficulty falling asleep” (49%); “waking up often at night” (39%) and “Irregular sleep and wake cycle” (38%). Vietnam (80%) and the Philippines (79%) had the largest number of respondents with sleep problems.

The popularity of sleep trackers was highest in Vietnam based on number of users (26%), and regionally, 14% of respondents indicated they were using a sleep tracker. Of those currently using sleep tracker apps, 10% and 47% said that these apps have helped to improve their sleep quality to a “great extent” and “some extent” respectively. In Singapore, users seem to observe less effective results, with 2% and 28% sharing similar sentiments.

Overall, the top 3 functions/data that were used to monitor sleep patterns were sleep duration (61%), sleep quality (i.e amount of uninterrupted sleep) (60%) and sleep phases (i.e light or deep sleep phases) (46%).

Personal privacy was not much of a concern as 89% of respondents were either “very comfortable” or “somewhat comfortable” when asked if they were comfortable to share their sleep actvity data with sleep tracker apps.

Sentiments among Thailand and Vietnam respondents were largely positive and around 3 in 10 indicated that they were “very comfortable” - Thailand (37%) and Vietnam (32%).

In anticipation of the launch of Pokemon Sleep, respondents were asked about their interest in trying Pokemon Sleep to track their sleep patterns and 72% responded positively (20% very interested; 52% somewhat interested). Interest in Vietnam ranked the highest (82%), followed by Thailand (76%) and the Philippines (76%).

Top 5 words that respondents used to describe what they think about Pokemon Sleep:

1. Interesting (51%)
2. Unique (32%)
3. Useful (32%)
4. Fun (28%)
5. Indifferent (13%)

With its captivating premise, Pokémon Sleep is poised to reshape the landscape of sleep tracking with 7 in 10 respondents in Southeast Asia either very/somewhat interested to try the app. There are promising opportunities for other companies to use gamification to drive behavioural change for users to track their sleep data and we expect to usher in a new era of health-conscious technology.

About Milieu Insight Milieu Insight is Southeast Asia's leading consumer research and data analytics company, renowned for its expertise in providing brands and businesses with valuable insights and market research data. Operating in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam, Milieu Insight’s industry-transforming solutions were awarded several prestigious awards, including Campaign Asia’s Market Research Agency of the Year (Gold) and Tech MVP 2022. Its one-stop insights platform, Canvas, offers tools for analysing and visualising consumer opinion data across a multitude of lifestyle topics and sectors, powering businesses to make better, more impactful decisions and strategies. Methodology: Based on Milieu Insight surveys with N=500 respondents each in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, conducted in April 2023.

From Silicon Valley to Cebu: Japanese tech leader on AI’s potential in the Philippines

Wazzup Pilipinas?!




Fujikura is leading Sansan’s expansion into the Philippines and in charge of hiring up to 100 staff at its new Cebu development center by next year



Starting his career at the Silicon Valley (California, USA) subsidiary of Japan’s Osaka Gas Company, Fujikura Shigemoto witnessed first-hand the exciting joint venture projects between Japanese and U.S. companies. He worked on developing cutting-edge technology and bringing it back to Japan, with colleagues who wanted to change the world. It also filled him with a vision of deeply changing the world through technology. He quit his California job and returned to Japan.There, he joined a young innovative startup called Sansan, which has since gone on to become one of Japan’s leading technology companies following a 2019 IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TYO:4443).

As Sansan’s 18th employee, Fujikura worked as an engineer/developer in infrastructure design and server architecture, before being asked to become a manager and then Chief Technology Officer. Today, he is in charge of directing all tech matters at Sansan and was the leader pushing for a global development center overseas as far back as 2019. Then COVID hit, and plans had to be postponed. Fast forward to today, he is leading the company’s expansion into the Philippines via a new development center in Cebu that opened last year. He brings with him a unique international perspective having lived in the US, Japan, and the Philippines, as well as academic excellence with a Master of Science (MSc) in Intellectual Creation Systems from the Kanazawa Institute of TechnologyKanazawa Institute of Technology.

Fujikura Shigemoto, Director and CTO at Sansan Global Development Center, is available for media interviews to expand on the above as well as discuss:Generative AI has been a big change for the industry to grapple with, forcing companies new and old to think about how to use it in their own business processes.

Technology by itself is neutral, and can be used poorly or well depending on leadership. A change of mindset is required if firms are to take advantage of the powerful capabilities, or get left behind. Software engineers will be expected to develop their own AI in-house, so it’s vital for them to understand how to use AI optimally in development.

The Philippines needs to educate its engineering talent pool and new graduates on using AI technology, and universities must take time to incorporate this into their syllabuses. There will be opportunities for government agencies that still rely heavily on paper invoices and contracts to leverage AI to help them go more fully digital. The country’s senate is already actively debating the impact of AI on jobs.

 
Sansan, the listed Japanese tech leader, has been using optical character recognition (OCR) informed by AI to increase contextualization and enable 99.9% accuracy in its document scanning, as a core capability of its cloud platform since day one. Today, AI plays an important role in Sansan understanding the vast amounts of data that exist on its platform.

 
While the company has no immediate plans to develop its own generative AI, its teams in Tokyo have started using GPT4 as a layer running in the background. For example, in its Contract One service, which digitises contracts for SMEs and corporates, Sansan is leveraging generative AI to provide users with better suggestions. In future, Sansan expects to roll out more such capabilities across its invoicing and other services, and its technical team is actively exploring ways to incorporate machine learning to match duplicates in the Sansan contact management and digitally transformative cloud database.

VMware’s Comprehensive Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Solution Empowers IT Teams with Data-Driven Insights to Improve Employee Experience and Achieve Valuable Cost Savings

Wazzup Pilipinas!?




New feature enhancements with DEEM and ITSM Connector for ServiceNow further advance VMware’s Digital Employee Experience solution and empower IT teams to operate with efficiency and agility



Digital employee experience (DEX) technology has become essential as it not only enables organizations with the tools needed to provide great employee experiences, but also empowers IT teams to work more efficiently, yielding tangible cost savings. But present DEX solutions are fragmented and require multiple technology platforms and vendors to measure, analyze, deliver, and remediate workplace experiences. A unified approach is needed, and today, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) is announcing four unique enhancements to further its comprehensive DEX solution: the general availability of DEX for 3rd party managed devices, DEX for VMware Horizon, AI-driven Guided RCA, as well as the intent to expand Workspace ONE ITSM Connector for ServiceNow support of available remediation actions. These innovations combine to advance VMware’s commitment to deliver the only holistic DEX solution, which helps to increase productivity and provide faster issue remediation, enabling higher employee engagement.

“Organizations across industries are struggling to keep up with the increased IT incidents and growing employee turnover rates as they navigate the new challenges brought on by hybrid work. Successful organizations must prioritize technology that enables IT teams with the right tools to not only resolve issues faster, but prevent them from happening in the future,” said Shankar Iyer, senior vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. “VMware’s comprehensive DEX solution uses automation to enable IT teams with data-driven insights that enable improved efficiency and great experiences for employees.”



Scalable Platform Supports a Diverse Set of Use Cases

VMware progresses its DEX solution by unifying employee experience measurement across all endpoints, whether physical or virtual and VMware or 3rd party managed. Today, VMware announced that its Digital Employee Experience Management (DEEM) solution is now generally available for Windows devices managed by 3rd party solutions. With this update, VMware’s entire DEX offering, including Intelligent Hub, DEEM, and Assist, is now available for these devices. Even if a customer has standardized on other management solutions, this capability provides customers with more flexibility in how they deploy and grow their DEX solution.

For customers ready to extend measurement to virtual apps and desktops, VMware today announced that DEEM is also generally available for VMware Horizon. Customers can measure and analyze end-user experiences using Horizon virtual apps and desktops, bringing together network performance, log on time, and VM performance. If the experience score for Horizon changes, IT will be proactively alerted with automated notifications, enabling teams to more efficiently resolve issues impacting employee productivity using the Horizon platform for work.


A Comprehensive DEX Approach Allows IT to Remediate More Issues and “Shift Left”

Organizations cannot achieve a seamless employee experience without also controlling experience delivery and issues remediation. Today, VMware offers the only comprehensive solution that creates a closed loop cycle that allows IT to shift left, leveraging holistic experience data to proactively resolve issues and continuously improve employee experiences. With the VMware Workspace ONE award-winning unified endpoint management capabilities, customers have access to the broadest scope of remediation capabilities available today.

When experience issues arise, service desk teams are the first line of support for employees. By extending the same experience data that IT views in Workspace ONE into ServiceNow via VMware’s ITSM Connector, service desk teams can troubleshoot and resolve issues more efficiently. Today, VMware unveils further innovations to ITSM Connector including experience scoring, an expanded set of unified endpoint management actions, and the ability to trigger workflows created by IT teams in VMware Freestyle Orchestrator. By leveraging experience scores, the service desk can proactively resolve other potential issues impacting a user before it escalates and hinders workflow. These expanded remediation actions and workflows will continue to help decrease the time required to troubleshoot and resolve each issue.

“Our business runs on 200,000-plus smartphones and tablets deployed for our corporate users and frontline workers, visiting all citizens in France and through our distribution network (17,000 point-of-sale),” said Olivier Bombe, Head of Digital Workspace, Groupe La Poste. “With an integrated approach provided by VMware Workspace ONE, we give our IT and service desk teams visibility into issues impacting employee productivity, simplified troubleshooting, and automated remediation. Our service desk is empowered to improve Service Level Agreement for issues, and this has resulted in savings in engineering hours.”



Tangible ROI through Data-Driven Experience Management

IT teams are expected to manage more with less resources than ever before. VMware’s DEX offerings empower IT through Insights, Guided Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and Automation, enabling a proactive approach to IT. With AI-driven insights, IT organizations have immediate visibility into issues that are impacting employee productivity by using statistical machine learning models to automatically detect and score anomalies in experience. Guided RCA, now generally available, uses AI to identify the likely root cause of an issue with an associated confidence score. This helps reduce the time and effort required to identify the problem source. With integrated automation workflows, the appropriate remediation actions can be taken moving forward, scaling issue resolution and proactive employee notification. Recently, a VMware customer experiencing a pervasive laptop crash was able to identify the root cause using Guided RCA. Working with their application teams, the customer was able to resolve the issue quickly, saving them hundreds of engineering hours in lost productivity troubleshooting.



“VMware IT has been using DEX to shift to a more proactive, data-driven IT approach,” said Pam Cocca, vice president, IT Colleague Experience and Technology, VMware. “Not only has this saved engineering hours in resolving issues faster and at scale, but it has created colleague confidence in our IT organization. Using DEEM for Insights and proactive support, VMware IT has realized, on average, 35% reduction in mean time to resolution of support issues over the past six months1. This saves valuable IT time and returns employees to productivity quicker.”