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Plot twist: Starbucks PH is letting you actually pick your reward now

Starting July 21, you choose what you redeem and when, from just 50 Stars, on the new Starbucks PH app.

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Confession time: I have spent an embarrassing number of hours doing mental math in line at Starbucks, staring at my Stars balance like it owes me money. Ninety-eight Stars. So close!

Two Stars short of a free drink that would just… appear, whether I wanted it that week or not. That’s the old system for you. It decided for me and I just showed up to collect.

Well, girl, the glory days of blind Star hoarding are over, and honestly? I’m thrilled.

Starting July 21, Starbucks Philippines is scrapping the automatic 100-Star-equals-one-voucher system it’s run since 2019. In its place: a Multi-Tiered Rewards system that finally treats members like adults who know what they want. Which, let’s be real, is exactly what I’ve wanted the whole time. I didn’t want a random cake slice I never asked for. I wanted to choose.

Tiers, explained (because I know you’re already doing the math)

Here’s where it gets good: You’re no longer stuck waiting for triple digits to cash in.

At 50 Stars, you can get a free drink customization or a bakery pick like a bagel, a banana loaf, or my personal weakness, the doughnut. Fifty Stars used to get you nothing but a longer wait. Now, it gets you a treat.

At 100 Stars, the world opens up. Any handcrafted beverage or bakery item are all yours to pick. This used to be the only option on the menu. Now, it’s just the middle tier.

And then there’s the new 150-Star tier, which lets you trade in for pasta, a sandwich, or a full cake slice. A whole meal, earned in caffeine.

The only real exclusions to keep in mind: breve and the 2 oz heavy cream customization aren’t included at 50 Stars, and the Coffee Traveler Kit, French Press, and Reserve Ice Cream beverages sit outside the 100-Star tier. Small print, but worth knowing before you get to the counter with big plans.

The app situation (Deep breath, it’s fine)

Now, I’ll admit, hearing “you need a whole new app” gave me a small moment of panic.

New app, new login, new everything, right when I finally memorized where the barcode scanner button lives on the old one.

But here’s the relief: your Stars, your load balance, your account, all of it carries over automatically. No re-registering, and no starting from zero. You just download the new Starbucks PH App from the App Store or Google Play starting July 21, and your loyalty history walks right in with you.

The old app gets discontinued, so this isn’t optional, but it’s also not a hassle. Sign-in is faster, Star tracking updates in real time, and honestly, watching my Stars tick up instantly instead of refreshing the app like I’m checking a crush’s read receipts sounds like an upgrade I can get behind.

One thing to note if you’re a Mobile Order and Pay loyalist like me: it won’t be available on day one. Starbucks says it’s coming back in a future update, but the timing is still unannounced. Mildly inconvenient, but not a dealbreaker.

The part that actually changes how I use my Stars

Here’s the detail I didn’t expect to care about this much: Under the old system, your voucher’s 90-day countdown started the moment you crossed 100 Stars, whether you were ready to redeem or not.

Now, that 90-day clock only starts once you actually issue the reward yourself. Which means no more panic-ordering a bakery item I didn’t want just because the voucher was about to expire. I get to decide when the countdown even begins.

Stars still need to convert into a reward within a year, and anything unconverted still expires on your account anniversary, so it’s not an invitation to hoard forever. But within that window, the control is finally mine.

Starbucks Mobile

So, what now?

Mark your calendar for July 21. Download the new app, let your Stars migrate themselves while you do absolutely nothing, and start planning what you’re actually going to redeem instead of settling for whatever the algorithm decided you’d earned.

Fifty Stars for a banana loaf on a rough Monday. A hundred and fifty for a full pasta situation on a day that calls for one. My inner spreadsheet is already recalculating, and for once, that feels less like a chore and more like a plan.

Apps

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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