IT has been a stressful week of thunderstorms, floods, earthquakes, the threat of another Taal eruption, the Delta variant and perhaps another impeding lockdown, but in the midst of it all there was one piece of news that made us forget all the dreadful stuff happening.
Hidilyn Diaz won a gold medal in 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
For the first time since the Philippines joined the Olympics in 1924, we finally struck gold, ending our 97-year drought.
Diaz bagged the gold in the 55-kilogram women’s weightlifting category defeating record-holder Liao Qiuyun of China.
Besides our gold medal win, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics will go down in history as a sports event of several firsts for the Philippines, especially for our Filipina athletes. It’s the first time we have representatives for the women’s event in golf, our debut in the women’s street skateboarding event, and on the sidelines, we have the first Asian woman and first Filipina elected to the International Olympic Committee Executive Board, Mikee Cojuangco-Jaworski.
A total of 19 Filipino athletes is representing the country across a variety of sports. These include World Champion 2019 Carlos Yulo (Gymnastics), Gold Medalist EJ Obiena (Pole Vault), 2021 PGA Champion and Top 10 World Ranker Yuka Saso (Golf), Weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz, Boxing World Champion 2019 Nesthy Petecio, and top boxers Carlo Paalam, Eumir Marcial and Irish Magno.
Completing Team Philippines’ roster are: Elreen Ando (Weightlifting), Kurt Barbosa (Taekwondo), Margielyn Didal (Skateboarding), Luke Gebbie (Swimming), Kristina Knott (Athletics), Cris Nievarez (Rowing), Bianca Pagdanganan (Golf), Juvic Pagunsan (Golf), Remedy Rule (Swimming), Jayson Valdez (Shooting), and Kiyomi Watanabe (Judo).
And now that we are looking at possibly another medal thanks to another female athlete—Davaoeño boxer Nesthy Petecio—we are finally feeling the Olympic fever.
And the only cure is to watch the Olympic events even more.
Good news is you don’t have to stay home to do so, as you can watch all the games and updates anywhere on your mobile phone.
As an official broadcaster of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, Smart brings an entire world of sports and action straight to the palm of your hands 24/7. The telco offers the most comprehensive online streaming coverage, from live events, replays, highlights, athletes’ features, to daily news throughout the entire Olympics run.
If you are a Smart subscriber, all you have to do is turn on your mobile data and type gigafest.smart on your mobile browser.
You can choose from 10 channels including the Olympics pay-per-view (PPV) channel, pop-up channel, news channel, and seven ready-to-air channels from the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS).
Channel 1 streams the Main Ceremonies, Weightlifting, Judo, Rowing, Shooting, Athletics; Channel 2 is for swimming and basketball; Channel 3 features artistic gymnastics, boxing and basketball; Channel 4 for rowing, skateboard, boxing and basketball, Channel 5 for weightlifting, boxing, shooting and basketball; Channel 6 for golf and boxing; and Channel 7 features Taekwondo and Boxing.
You can also check out the daily schedule for each channel. Just swipe to find the featured sports on a specific time slot. To make sure you get uninterrupted broadcast, head over to the gigalife app first and subscribe to either the double giga, giga + or even their unli data promos if its accessible to you.
Recently, Smart has further enhanced the GigaLife App experience by introducing GigaPay with PayMaya, making it simpler and easier to buy load and subscribe to data promos, among others, with just a simple swipe on their phone screen.
Through GigaPay, all subscribers of Smart Prepaid, Smart Postpaid, Smart Bro, Prepaid Home WiFi, and TNT may conveniently link their PayMaya account to the GigaLife App to make it their payment source for all their in-app transactions.
Now, there’s no need to switch between apps and do multiple log-ins to multiple accounts to up your Smart account or avail of data promos. Subscribers can now make these purchases without getting off the GigaLife App and just use its GigaPay feature for a much smarter and more seamless way to pay.
I initially got the GIGA VIDEO 99 for 7 days and so far I’ve been Olympics binge-watching for the past two days—and I can’t wait to use up my data so I could subscribe to unli data in time for the closing ceremonies. You get the standard video quality which is good enough and just make sure you have good signal, to enjoy uninterrupted livestream broadcast.
Staying true to its thrust to bring amazing experiences to Filipinos through technology made simple, Smart has been breaking ground in delivering world-class events to subscribers through gigafest.smart. Gigafest.smart recently provided real-time streaming of the Gilas Pilipinas’ participation in the FIBA Asia Clark leg and the FIBA Olympic Qualifying Tournament (OQT) earlier this month. Besides major sporting events, it also streamed a series of local and international online concerts to delight music fans, such as KCON:TACT, iHeartRadio Music Festival, Mnet Asian Music Awards, and the recent Billboard Music Awards, among others.
THE NFT HYPE
IF you’ve ever heard of NFT, then you’ve also probably heard that digital assets have been selling for millions of dollars recently.
The first-ever tweet of Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, for example, sold as an NFT for over $2.9 million. The tweet, which says “just setting up my twttr,” was first posted by Dorsey on March 21, 2006.
An NFT (non-fungible token) is a digital asset that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos. They are bought and sold online, frequently with cryptocurrency, and they are generally encoded with the same underlying software as many cryptos. They run on blockchain, a decentralized digital ledger that documents transactions, ownership and validity of each which can be tracked.
With all the attention it’s been getting this year, will NFTs be the NBT (Next Big Thing) here in the Philippines?
Julius Santillan, founder of VNT Vention, certainly believes so.
VNT Vention is a digital platform that involves selling and auctioning stuff online. Santillan said the company aims to help local artists and showbiz personalities to sell their collectibles and works of art.
The platform’s main objective is to encourage Pinoy artists to use the blockchain technology in distributing their masterpieces to collectors and fans. Vention believes that “by tokenizing their works and selling them in a digital marketplace, they can maximize their reach for potential customers.
Already, it has gained the attention of social-media star Ivana Alawi and rapper Gloc 9 who joined the livestream launch of VNT Vention, called “Pancakeswap Fair Launch.”
Vention Platform is a place where artists play on a level playing field with a large and active userbase made up of artist and celebrities. It is all about valuable and collectible NFTs; it’s about gaining value and fame. It is also about the protection of undervalued talents and skills.
To ensure that artist and celebrities are protected of their intellectual and talent creations, they included NFT farming as a feature. Owners of whitelisted NFTs can soon stake their creations. This means protection of their talents and, of course, their hard-earned money via earning VNT Tokens. VNT Farming is provided to ensure that talent and skills are protected, given the proper fame, and the earning value they deserve.
VNT Vention is a global market site focusing on artists and their creations. It lets anyone create, buy, sell, or collect digital merchandize with minimal platform fees. It’s the first of its kind in the Philippines as it wishes to attract more local artists, such as actors, musicians, painters, authors and the like.
More information can be found at vention.app.