“$28 for 120 min Massage or 60 min Massage + 10 min Hot Stone Back Therapy (Worth $125)”

“70% off Private movie screening for up to 25 pax at luxurious Film Theatre Screening Room”

These are familiar offering headlines you see on group-buying sites, among the popular ones are Groupon, LivingSocial etc.

It’s a hype now, as if you are so outdated for not knowing what group-buying business is about.

How It Works

Basically how group-buying sites work is that you will be convinced to subscribe to their newsletter (so that they can spam you every day), check out deals you are interested in, hit a “Buy Now” button and wait for minimum number of people to be on the same deal before the deal is on.

This way, you tend to lure people around you to get onto the deal (simply because you want the deal to be on). And once the deal is on, they will charge into your credit card, send you printable voucher via email and you are good to redeem your voucher and enjoy your deal.

Merchants’ Perspective

It has been a mixed response from the merchants.

There are happy merchants who deliberately write good testimonials about the services, while some 55 percent of people who have run a daily deal campaign said they would not do so again. Some even claim that using group-buying site was the biggest mistake of her life, and angry merchant list goes on.

Let’s be fair. My personal view on this is that group-buying is merely yet-another-marketing-tool.

The merchant pays in hopes of getting new customers in the door that will hopefully love their service and come back again. Most group-buying sites offer no upfront cost to the merchant, and the total cost per customer is likely to be lower than other forms of advertising.

The main factor in the game is to know how to cap deals. To know how many customers you can manage at one go. Imagine you run a coffee shop which serves 50pax at a time, and you sold 10,000 deal vouchers which can only be redeemed within one month. That’s essentially 333 customers per day on average, and what’s more if customers tend to show up only when they realise the expiry is around the corner?

These situations do not only happen on group-buying deals, but it’s a business risk that every business person should consider before running any deals. What’s more sites like Groupon even go to the extend of offering merchants a series of services and advises for merchants to ensure success.

Just like double-edged sword.

What About Consumers’ Perspective?

There’s a need to have merchants happy and customers happy to ensure good businesses.

From group-buying sites, we see happy consumers and angry customers. But I believe most of the consumers are logical and matured enough to make their own buying decisions.

However since group-buying is fundamentally a marketing tool, it is designed to lure consumers to buy the products and services. It happens to print-ad and other medium of advertising, isn’t it?

Personal Experience

Perhaps I would share my personal experience on group-buying site as a consumer.

It was one fine day when I came across my friend’s Facebook update on a deal that starts with “65% off on 4D3N for 2 pax at Lombok’s exclusive boutique resort …”

Out of curiousity I clicked on the link and read through the deal.

Here are some summarized details of the deal:

- 4D3N stay in a 1 bedroom suite at exclusive boutique resort Imaj Private Villas
- Top up SGD$100 to upgrade to 2 bedroom villas or Honey Moon villas
- Valid for 2 years
- No blackout dates, no peak season surcharges
- Vouchers are transferrable, inclusive of all taxes
- Above sweet deal at only SGD$200

To add onto the details, Lombok is the island to the east of Bali and SilkAir flies there 4 times a week or a short 15min flight from Bali or a speed boat are available.

And the deal page looks like this:

I was thinking, how about getting this as a gift for my soon-to-retire parents? SGD$200 sounds like a sweet deal for them to get onto a short relaxing getaway.

The participant bar showed that the deal is 70% to reach the maximum cap, and the deal was on with 80 people already on the deal. The clock was ticking and without further hesitation, I signed up an account with StreetDeal.sg, keyed in all my personal and credit card particulars. Right before I hit the Pay Now button, I decided to seek for second opinion.

I started to look out for other details and figured out a few drawbacks:

- cheapest all-in SilkAir return ticket costs SGD$304.2/person
- return speedboat ticket from Bali to Lombok costs SGD$153/person
- not much activities for elderly in Lombok to keep you staying for 4 days
- journey from my hometown to Singapore is another hassle of 6-8 hours double transit flight

After thinking through all these considerations, I decided to just cancel my purchase and look at something else for my parents’ retirement gift.

I had to admit that the countdown counters, with fine-tuned headlines and attractive photos on the group-buying site, the deals are too good to resist!

My advise for those of you out there would be to seek for second opinions before you make your purchase on group-buying sites. If you really want to make a purchase, put away the deal and come back after an hour or so. You may then be thinking, “how silly am I if I would have purchased that!?” *grins*

So, is group buying really a good deal?

I’d say it varies on individual cases.

If you are a regular, say, spa customer and you get a chance to try out a new spa service with $200 spa voucher at $90, it could be a good deal.

It’s essentially the consumers’ decision making that matters.

Have you ever tried searching your full name (or nicknames) on search engines? When you search for your full name, also try encapsulating it with double quotes and also multiple combinations of your first and last names.

Let’s say, if your full name is Wong Sum Ting, try searching for “Wong Sum Ting”, or “Sum Ting Wong”, or even “Wong Ting Sum” in Google. You may find yourself at places where you don’t even expect to see yourself (that includes your university final year project member list, for example)

If you haven’t done so, spend some time and Google Yourself. For good or for bad.

For those who have watched “The Social Network”, recall what Erica Albright said: “The Internet’s not written in pencil, Mark. It’s written in ink.”

So, be aware of what you do on the WWW.

And as your identity grows along the way, you are more exposed to identity theft, a form of fraud or cheating of another person’s identity in which someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person’s identity, typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person’s name.

If you notice for most sites that requires password, they do offer password recovery. If you put in some effort, you may see that most of the sites will ask for some security questions, in which it may be one of the following details:

- Your Birth Date And Place
- Your Mother’s Maiden Name
- Your Home Address
- Your Phone Numbers
- Your Favourites (of anything)
- Your Family Members’ Name

And the list goes on. So be sure you don’t expose them on WWW (or even elsewhere).

However undoubtedly I do agree that your identity on WWW may also help you to brand yourself, just like double edged sword.

My take will be, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

If you need to brand yourself, play safe and let there be bottom lines.

I have just renewed my soon-to-expire Malaysia passport at Malaysia Highcommision in Singapore, and I thought it would be beneficial to share the process here.

Do note that the information below is applicable as of 26 Oct 2010.

For most updated details, you may always refer to High Commission of Malaysia in Singapore site.

Getting Ready

You will need the following, both original copy and photocopy:

• 1. Existing Passport
• 2. Singapore NRIC
• 3. Malaysia IC

On top of that, you will also need to bring SGD$124 cash (or depending on the conversion rate on that day for RM300), and 2 pieces of 35mmx50mm passport size photo with dark blue background (you can take the photo in Malaysia Highcomm but that will waste you one round of queue waiting). Photocopy service is also available there if you couldn’t get your documents photocopied before hand. The queue is relatively short as compared to photo booth.

A lot of people are suggesting to duly complete Form IM.42 but frankly, you don’t have to. You will be given the form free of charge at guard house when you exchange your visitor pass. It’s printed RM1.00 on it, but I did not need to pay anything.

Some says (even the Malaysia Highcomm page is saying) that you will need Registration of Malaysian Citizens in Singapore form, but I did not prepare it and was not asked for it.

Getting There

You may find the Malaysia Highcommision location as shown below:

You may opt to take taxi/cab to avoid any hassles, or you may take any of these bus service: 14, 65, 32, 139 & 970.

Becareful that the Google Map may be slightly confusing. If you are taking bus and alighting in front of SPC station, you may want to walk into Jervois Rd from Metico Centre direction and walk up. I personally walked up Nathan Road and made one big round.

You may also find the following Google Street View useful. What you are seeing here is the guard post where you can exchange your visitor pass.

View Larger Map

And that small gate you see below is the entrance after you exchanged your visitor pass.

Yes, that small tiny gate

View Larger Map

Proper Flow

As mentioned earlier, once you reached you should go straight to the guard house to exchange for visitor pass. Use any of your photo ID card except your Singapore NRIC and Malaysia IC as you will need them both in the building. In my case, I used my driving license.

If you are going on weekdays, I would recommend you to arrive at around 7:45AM, not too early and not too late. I was the 30th+ in the queue when I reached, and could have been a lot more faster (as mentioned earlier) if I had my passport photos ready.

The building will be open for entrance around 7:30AM for photo taking and all, and you can start to queue up for queue number at around 8:10AM. Once you’ve got your queue number, sit down and wait for your turn.

The process is rather simple, they will call your number, you will pass them all the documents prepared, they will ask you to press both your thumbs onto finger print reader, print a manual ink thumbprint on the form, pay the fee and you’re done.

Do note that at this point you will not be given any receipt for the cash you paid. What you have with you is a collection slip with a unique number on it.

Passport Collection

You may collect your passport on the same day in the afternoon.

Although it says that they will be opened at 2:30PM, be there early at about 1:45PM (I reached around 1:30PM and was 17th in the queue).

Go to the guard house, exchange for a passport collection pass, and wait for the door to open. The queue number is the number written on your pass tag.

The collection is rather fast, where each person in the queue will only take around 3-5 minutes. The door will be open at around 2:00PM and they will start distributing the passport at around 2:10PM.

The timing will depend on whether it’s weekdays or weekends, and whether it is peak period (ie. approaching school holidays where everyone realised that their passport has got less than 6 months validity). All above timing are based on my experience on 26th October 2010.

Re-entry Permit Transfer

Last but not least, if you are a Permanent Resident in Singapore, do not forget to transfer your re-entry permit at Electronic Re-Entry Permit (e-REP). Some of you may also find the lengthy e-REP User Manual useful.

Hope some, if not most of you, find the quick guide helpful

Additional Info / Tips

1. When filling in the form, your current address should be Singapore address (no Malaysia address is allowed or you have to refill your form). (Thanks David for this tips!)

2. Paste both photos on the form, one in front (box provided) and one at the back (box not provided, but in the right hand column, at the top). You may refer to instructions in samples pasted on the board which you will see straight in front after entering. (Thanks David for this tips!)

3. For form and documents submission, you have to queue for your queue number and not based on your pass number. The queue number will be based on our pass number only for passport collection. (Thanks David for this tips!)

If you are familiar with Cufón or sIFR, you may already familiar with rendering web text in different typeface. But not many of us are aware of the CSS @font-face implementation of typeface rendering (though it has been there for more than 10 years).

Among the more known players are Typekit and Google Fonts, and I’m going to talk about the latter simply because it is free.

With 60 fonts available free of charge, Google Fonts allow you to embed fonts onto your website. What’s more if you don’t even have to pay for the hosting and it loads fast. And… it’s Google, anyway.

You may also want to take note on the @font-face browser compatibility.

I have created a really simple sample page to show you a demo on how text are displayed using Google Font. You may want to view source to see how it is (easily) implemented. And one interesting thing to note is that the total page dependencies are only 627 bytes.

By the way, it looks great on iPhone 4′s retina display too

Cheers!

Microsoft unveiled the beta version of Internet Explorer 9 this week, which the company hopes will allow it to maintain its market-share lead against other competitors like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Microsoft claimed in a Sept. 15 presentation in San Francisco that Internet Explorer 9 provides the best performance on the Web, leveraging both HTML5 and Windows 7 to deliver rich content faster.

That seems interesting enough for me to give it a try.

After spending 2 days of installation process (I’ll explain in detail below on what I’ve gone through), I finally managed to get the most anticipated Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta installed on my Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit).

If you had problem installing IE9 Beta on your Windows Vista, or if you are planning to install IE9 Beta on your Windows Vista, be sure to read on as it could possibly save you hours of frustrations!

Nightmare Begins

According to Microsoft, you need a Windows PC running either Windows 7 or Vista to install IE9 Beta.

Since I’m running on Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit), I downloaded IE9 Beta installer and tried running the installer.

The installation appeared to take forever to complete, and I was stucked on the screen below for more than an hour (no kidding).

After waiting for more than an hour, I was prompted the following screen. Hitting “Get update” button actually brings me to a page on Prerequisites for installing Internet Explorer 9 Beta.

Great. Do you really need to take that long to tell me that!?

Amid the frustrations, I followed the instruction, downloaded and installed both “Windows Graphics, Imaging, and XPS Library” and “Platform Update Supplement Beta for Windows Vista”, and repeated the IE9 Beta installation process.

Then again I was caught in the same loop, waited for more than an hour and got the same error message that brought me to the same Microsoft page.

I tried restarting Windows numerous times but nothing worked.

After struggling for two days, I finally sorted things out that I (1) installed Windows Vista Service Pack 2, and (2) updated all available updates through Windows Updates.

Finally I am seeing some lights, pay close attention to the status progress text that says “Downloading Internet Explorer 9″ instead of the previous “Downloading required updates”.

And subsequently if you see the following, it is no doubt you are almost there!

And this is the message you would want to see eventually.

Restart your Windows and you are good to go with Internet Explorer 9 Beta.

JavaScript Errors, still

Upon installation, the first site I load up was Facebook since that’s like the most visited website at this point of time. Without surprise, Facebook still showed no mercy on Internet Explorer 9 Beta – JavaScript Error. Dang!

And one of my favourite tech blog Engadget, too, suffered from JavaScript error.

So long there are no single standard web browser engine, there will be endless cross-browser compatibility works to be done. In fact that’s why web developers and engineers like me survive, right?

Sum it all

I installed IE9 Beta just for the sake of it, simply because it was so much talked about and being a web developer myself, it would be a lagger for not getting a hold of it.

Microsoft has finally realised that browsing is about the website, hence it’s good that they increase the browsing area while taking away the unnecessary toolbars. This change in layout, however, is annoying me in a way because of the crammed tab area. I just couldn’t understand the logic of having the URL bar and tabs on the same line, and not allowing us to change that. Hello Microsoft, not everyone has wide screen!

Another noticable annoying thing on IE9 Beta is that the text seems to be awkwardly rendered and difficult to read, wonder if anyone else felt the same.

And there are people who did various browser rendering and some other benchmark tests claimed that Internet Explorer 9 is slower in every conceivable way than the platform preview. Again, I’m not surprised on that.

Being a web developer, frankly speaking Internet Explorer has given us enough troubles to sacrify our sleep and play time. Having websites checked in all IE6, IE7, and IE8 has been very time consuming and the only most accurate way of doing it is to download hundreds MB of Windows XP that comes with these browsers and use it on Virtual PC.

IE9 Beta has got developer tool integrated in with ease of use, it allows you to render the IE7 and IE8 with least effort. This seem to be a great feature, although I’d really have IE6 in the list too! Has anyone tested and verified this developer tool by the way?

I’m sure I have not spend enough time on the browser to give any in-depth review, but that’s not the whole purpose of this blog post.

Hopefully the experience I had on the installation (and the solutions) could save some of you a few hours.

Last but not least, if you want to uninstall your IE9 Beta, you may want to check out the steps here.

As of today, Google has a significantly huge market share of 84.96% (resource) and is definitely hard for website owners to ignore.

I’m going to walk you through on how I generated XML Sitemaps for adorr.net (powered by WordPress) and submit the sitemap to Google for in-depth crawling.

Before we proceed further, I would assume that your site is running on WordPress, as per stated in this post title.

Generate Google XML Sitemap

First of all, you will need to download WordPress Google XML Sitemaps plugin and install it on your WordPress site. If you haven’t know how to install WordPress plugin, check out the steps here.

** Do note that if your WordPress has Multisite feature turned on, follow this instruction instead!

Once you’ve got the plugin installed and activated, browse to Settings > XML-Sitemaps

Look out for a link button to “build the sitemap” for the first time. If you get a permission error, check the file permissions of the plugin files.

The plugin will then automatically generate the XML Sitemap file. Mine is located at http://adorr.net/sitemap.xml (default location is on your root, unless you changed it, check the value under “Location of your sitemap file”)

The next time you want to rebuild the sitemap, click on the link button “Rebuild the sitemap” on top of the plugin page.

This is, however, optional since by default the option “Rebuild sitemap if you change the content of your blog” is checked.

XML Sitemap to Google

Next, login to your Google Webmaster Tools account. If you haven’t own one, free registration is just a few steps away.

On post-login page, click on “Add a site…” button and type in your domain name.

** Make sure you have a consistent domain, e.g. www.adorr.net or adorr.net, since they are treated differently. If you need an idea on how to make this happen, check out my another post on this.

There’s a simple validation process, where you are required to add in an additional metadata onto your site header, within <head> tag.

It should look similar to mine as shown below (except that with different content value, of course):

<meta name="google-site-verification" content="xoS99zieD3E8wqSqd-QFQmEyMKUEU9nyf36F0_m5lNw" />

Once done, browse to “your site” > Site Configuration > Sitemaps, click on “Submit a Sitemap” button and type in your sitemap file and location (it’s sitemap.xml by default, unless you changed it in previous steps when generating sitemap)

It usually takes 5 – 15 seconds for Google to download your sitemap file and digest.

If everything goes smoothly up to this point, you shall leave the rest to Google Bot to crawl your site

Last but not least

There are a few other tools that you may find it useful, e.g. Crawl stats, Site performance, but I’ll leave that to you to discover.

Hope these simple steps will help you a little, if not much, on your site’s SEO.

Cheers!