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Starbucks Mobile Order & Pay 2.0: Cut through the queue

Make life less hectic!

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When you’re an adult, coffee isn’t just a power-up drink helping you get through the day. It becomes an avenue for conversation, an invitation to meet people, a kick you need to fuel your creativity and productivity.

While there are several ways to brew coffee and there are different local neighborhood cafés to explore, Starbucks has always been within reach. And it has ingrained itself as an important part of my working life. A staple of the modern workforce’s culture. A lifestyle — tradition to an extent — that seeped in through the interstices of friendships and family.

When the pandemic struck, I started learning how to brew my own coffee. Occasionally, I order my caffeine fix through Grab or Foodpanda. But the experience isn’t the same.

Keyword: Experience. That’s precisely what Starbucks offers. So when Starbucks Philippines sent me a holiday card to try the new Mobile Order & Pay, a feature they had for a while that was rehashed, I decided it’s time to go out and try again.

Exploring the app

The Mobile Order & Pay 2.0 is available through the Starbucks app. If you’re a Starbucks lover, you probably have an account registered to Starbucks Rewards. The app is easy to use, particularly because of its clean user interface (UI) design.

Through the Starbucks app, you can check your account’s transaction history, monitor the stars collected via the Rewards program, and make some changes to your personal profile and payment methods. The app also has a lot of promotional materials, parading their latest drinks and treats that you can avail yourself of in-store or online.

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And more importantly, you can reload your account, register your cards, and of course, get ahead of your day and order your favorite beverages.

Cut through the line

Once I got my cards settled in, I ordered my go-to drink: Cold brew topped with four pumps of white mocha sauce. I placed my order through the Mobile Order & Pay 2.0 feature, which gave me four options to pick up my order. Although, the options vary depending on the closest branch near you.

There’s the usual In-store pickup where you head straight to the pickup counter for your order. Yes, you won’t get in line anymore. When I tried this pickup option, everyone gave me looks when I went past the queue and headed straight to ask the Barista about my order. I had the audacity to ask about my drink because the app notified me when the order was ready.

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When I got my drink, I walked out of the store feeling ravished. It felt like I was in a slow-mo montage of a coming-of-age film where the protagonist suddenly did something extraordinary. Frankly, this is my favorite pickup option. It makes so much sense to just get your orders if you can walk inside. And that gives you extra steps for your smartwatch to count. Get moving, people!

But if you don’t like the hassle of scanning your QR codes and getting your temperature checked, or the usual mumbo-jumbo you encounter inside a store, there are other pickup options outside.

Just wait outside

My other favorite option was the Outdoor pickup, which I chose when I was passing by Starbucks The Grove — my favorite branch in Pasig. I was dead-tired from a weekend night-out with my friends at Okada Manila, and the all-night casino adventure bled through a Monday morning.

I was on my way home, ready for work. Then, I realized I badly need the good ol’ Barista Drink. Nothing can beat an americano topped with white mocha sauce splashed with sub-breve (and no water!). Especially when it comes to waking you and your senses up. More importantly, you can have it served iced or hot depending on your preferences.

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I placed my order when I was already in Arcovia City, a kilometer away from The Grove by Rockwell. Apparently, you can’t order ahead for an Outdoor pickup if you’re 3 kilometers away, which I tried to do when I was still in Taguig. So you have to be close to the branch if you want to place your order.

I tried to do the math in my head, calculating if I can pull over for a minute while I wait for my order. But I’m bad at numbers so I went ahead. The app said the order will be ready in five to six minutes anyway.

I pulled over when I arrived at the branch, and I didn’t wait long enough for one of my favorite baristas to come out to my chosen pickup point and hand me my order.

Stay in your car

I hate parking. Or wasting the time spent trying to park properly in between enormous SUVs. Or finding a spot to park your vehicle. This is why I don’t understand the Curbside pickup option, where the barista locates your designated parking slot and gives your order while practicing social and safe distancing.

I tried the pickup option in Starbucks Sierra Valley — a humongous, stand-alone branch with a massive parking space and drive-thru option found east of Metro Manila.

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If you’re in a time crunch, this option really doesn’t make sense. But if you have a few moments to spare and you don’t want to get out of your vehicle for safety measures against the COVID-19 (and its variants), then the Curbside pickup is the way to go.

Frankly speaking, it doesn’t work for me. I know having your order brought to you is part of the experience, but I value my time. And it was against my morals to just sit inside my car and wait for the barista to come out and bring my order. In my head, they could be doing more valuable things than going outside the store, when I can pick up my order at their counter.

The In-store pickup is the fastest option in my experience, and I feel good doing the task instead of sitting and waiting around. I guess it’s my can-do attitude speaking, but that’s how I’m really built.

Drive through it

Now, there’s another option to get your order: Drive-thru pickup. You just have to line up in a queue of cars and wait for your turn. Like the Curbside pickup option, I didn’t like the Drive-thru pickup for one reason: It takes too long to get through the drive-thru window.

People are afraid to get out of their vehicles because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that’s valid. That’s why there are plenty of cars lining up to get their caffeine fix. I spent roughly 30 minutes waiting for my turn, which annoyed me since it would’ve been faster if I chose the In-store or Outdoor pickup.

Making life less hectic

Regardless of my rants and experience, the Mobile Order & Pay 2.0 lets you get your favorite treats and beverages conveniently. In the way you like it.

While I’ve loved the In-store and Outdoor pick-up because they work well with my personality and lifestyle, I know some people (read: friends) would enjoy the Curbside and Drive-thru pickup. Especially since they’re cautious about the pandemic.

Not that I’m not wary of the virus being out there, I just value my time because every second counts. If I wanted to waste my time waiting, I would’ve lined up inside.

Nevertheless, the rehashed feature is worth giving a try. Through the Starbucks app, you can customize your orders. Just like your baristas, the app can modify the size, the number of espresso shots, dairy selection, and various options for your order. All done with just a single tap on your smartphone.

Frankly speaking, the Mobile Pay & Order 2.0 made my life easier especially when I’m in a hurry to get a caffeine fix. Not all days can be spent brewing your coffee, living in a slowed-down lifestyle. Some days, we just need to get through it, and Starbucks knows how to accompany me through those days.

The Starbucks PH app is available on The App Store and Google’s Play Store.

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Canva teams up with SB19 to turn A’TIN’s passion into creativity

Campaign lets fans access assets, editable templates, more

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Canva Philippines has joined forces with SB19 and Sony Music Entertainment to launch the “Kaya sa Canva” campaign.

This first-of-its-kind initiative is aimed at transforming the popular Filipino boy band’s fanbase into creators by giving them access to official design assets, exclusive templates, and powerful creative tools.

That’s of course as fans have a way of creating artwork, banners, and more outputs to honor their idols.

As such, the partnership enables the A’TIN (SB19’s fanbase) to access the Canva-exclusive SB19’s Creative Hub.

This dedicated space lets fans access assets, including SB19-inspired sticker packs, custom typography, and editable templates inspired by the group.

Fans around the world will initially have access to templates for photo-booth strips, wallpapers, posters, and videos.

The campaign will then expand with Canva-exclusive assets celebrating the group’s New Era, as well as their latest single, “Lawless”.

Meanwhile, the original song “KAYA” is accompanied with an upbeat music video, doubling as a love letter to A’TIN and a masterclass in Canva’s tools.

Every visual and animation is fan-inspired, a celebration of the creativity, passion, and dedication that’s defined in the community from day one.

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Samsung’s bet on the future of connected health: Less data, more action

Inside Samsung’s plan to close the gap between your wearable and your doctor

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Here’s a paradox worth sitting with: Wearable adoption keeps climbing. A lot of people now walk around with a sensor on their wrist, tracking heart rate, sleep, steps, sometimes ECG. And yet chronic disease rates haven’t moved.

That’s the problem Dr. Hon Pak, Samsung’s Head of Digital Health globally, opened with at a recent panel on the future of connected care. More data hasn’t meant better healthcare. His diagnosis: a first-mile, last-mile issue.

The first mile is that all this wearable data rarely makes it to a doctor in any usable form. The last mile is that even when a doctor says “lose weight, eat better, move more,” that advice tends to dissolve the moment real life takes over.

Picking up kids, caring for parents, getting through a Tuesday, it’s not that people don’t know what to do. It’s that knowing and doing are two different problems.

Samsung’s answer involves three things it says connected care needs to mature: meeting people where they actually are, building enough trust that people rely on the data, and using AI to turn that data into something a person can act on rather than just look at.

The Tuesday evening problem

Karthik Poriya, Head of Product at Samsung Food, framed the everyday failure point clearly. Picture it: long day, you’re tired, staring into the fridge. You’re not reaching for the healthiest option in that moment, you’re reaching for whatever’s fastest and most satisfying.

For years, nutrition tracking has focused on logging what already happened. Poriya’s team wants to intervene right at that decision point instead, pairing Samsung Health’s underlying data (BMI, antioxidant index, glycation markers) with Samsung Food’s recipe index of roughly 40,000 dishes mapped across 34 nutrients, so a health number turns into an actual dinner suggestion rather than another stat to check later.

Dr. Pak backed this with a small, concrete example from his own family: moving leftover cheesecake out of eye-level in the fridge and putting washed, sliced carrots there instead.

Kevin Duffy, CEO of connected fitness company iFit, made a similar point about exercise. The most effective tool for sticking to a fitness plan is a personal trainer, he said, citing roughly 80% higher adherence compared to going it alone.

The problem is cost: US$100 an hour or more in a major city puts that out of reach for most people. iFit’s bet is that AI can deliver something closer to a personal trainer’s precision and motivation at a price that isn’t elitist.

Duffy pointed to three reasons his company partners with Samsung specifically: reach (Samsung hardware is already in people’s homes, on their wrists and TVs), access to the biomarker data needed to build an accurate plan, and the fact that fitness goals don’t exist in isolation from sleep and nutrition data.

Trust has to come before any of this works

None of the behavior-change ambitions matter if people don’t trust the data or the company holding it. Rohit R. L., who heads Samsung’s Technology Innovation Lab in the UK, laid out how his team approaches that.

Privacy comes first: Samsung, he said, treats itself as a custodian of user data rather than an owner of it. On top of that sits clinical validation, meaning published, peer-reviewed evidence that a feature actually works in the real world, not just in a lab.

He gave a specific example: Samsung’s ECG and irregular heart rhythm notifications have been clinically validated and cleared by regulators to detect signs of atrial fibrillation. He was careful with the wording there, detect signs of, not diagnose, since that distinction matters both medically and legally.

A separate study on fall detection for elderly users turned up a more human finding. The detection algorithm worked well in testing, but in real life people don’t wear their watches around the clock, and falls don’t happen on a schedule.

Dr. Pak drew a useful comparison: nobody tells their MRI technician they’re going to fidget through the scan, but with a wearable, you don’t get to control how or when someone wears it. Real-world validation has to account for that.

On the infrastructure side, Rohit described a three-layer privacy approach: on-device protection through Samsung’s Knox security framework, GDPR-compliant data handling, and alignment with the European Health Data Space, including a decentralized clinical trial system where patient identity stays with the hospital rather than moving to Samsung’s side.

Where AI actually comes in

The most technically dense part of the discussion came from Otavio Penatti, who leads Samsung’s Health AI R&D team in Brazil.

His team works on foundation models, the same category of large-scale AI models trained on unlabeled data that underpin most of today’s popular AI systems. Trained once on a huge amount of sensor data, these models can then be fine-tuned for many specific health applications, which tends to make them more accurate than models built for a single narrow task.

Penatti’s team is training these models on wearable sensor data (PPG, ECG, accelerometer) with the goal of getting the model to, as he put it, understand the body’s own signals well enough to translate them into something useful. Longer term, he sees potential in correlating that sensor data with clinical records to flag disease risk before symptoms show up.

Dr. Pak added a striking data point from Stanford research: a foundation model trained on sleep study data was able to look at just a 24-hour window of sleep and predict risk across more than 130 different diseases.

His takeaway was that the signals for a lot of future health problems are already sitting in the data being collected today, we just don’t yet know how to read all of them.

He closed this part with a number worth sitting with. A recent American Medical Association survey found that 97% of physicians have looked at wearable data at some point. Only 15 to 16% actually use it in day-to-day practice.

The top reason cited wasn’t distrust of the data, it was that the data doesn’t plug into existing clinical workflows. That’s part of why Samsung acquired health data platform Xealth, to build a pipeline that gets wellness data into the systems doctors already use.

Five years out

Asked to look five years ahead, each panelist’s answer tracked closely to their own corner of the problem. Poriya described a proactive dietitian in your pocket, one that doesn’t wait to be asked.

Rohit pointed to connected care that clinicians actually trust and patients fully control. Penatti envisioned AI that continuously links everyday behavior to clinical outcomes, catching problems before they start. Duffy’s version was a constant personal wellness coach, sifting through the data noise to tell you exactly what to do next.

The throughline across all four answers is the same: less raw data, more action. Samsung’s panel made the case that the wearable industry has spent the last decade solving for collection, more sensors, more metrics, more dashboards, while the harder problem, turning that information into something a tired person actually does on a Tuesday night, has barely been touched.

Whether foundation models and better clinical integration actually close that gap is still an open question. But it’s clearly the one Samsung is choosing to spend its next five years on.

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Rain or shine, MOVE IT’s new commuter kit has you covered

Now available on GrabMart

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Manila weather is notoriously unpredictable during the rainy season. Clear 7 AM skies easily turn into 5 PM downpours. For motorcycle-taxi commuters, arriving at work dry is a total coin flip.

MOVE IT aims to fix this with Ride-Ready, a line of commuter essentials sold exclusively on GrabMart.

The collection features a packable rain jacket, a helmet liner scarf or cap, and a refresh kit with alcohol spray, cooling wipes, and tissues.

Addressing rider concerns

Motorcycle-taxis are now central to daily commutes. MOVE IT reported a 20% year-over-year jump in monthly active users during the first half of the year. Still, riders consistently voice the same worries: sudden rain, punishing heat, and shared helmet hygiene.

“Filipino commuters have become extraordinarily good at adapting to city life. What they should not have to accept is arriving at a meeting soaked, or starting the afternoon already behind,” says MOVE IT General Manager Wayne Jacinto.

Jacinto calls Ride-Ready a practical fix to help passengers end their ride looking as fresh as when they left home.

Price, availability

MOVE IT didn’t just launch online. From June to July, interactive booths popped up in major business hubs: Makati, BGC, Ortigas, and Cebu City. Commuters could claim items and book rides on-site.

With traffic and bad weather showing no signs of stopping, Ride-Ready offers a simple buffer so riders show up fresh instead of frazzled.

The lineup launched on GrabMart on July 13. Prices start at PhP 275, with mix-and-match savings bundles available. Check MOVE IT’s official social media channels for more details.

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