On March 16, some 42,000 Singaporeans zoomed in on a Subway deal that offered buyers any 6-inch sandwich worth up to $6.50 at half the price. Some $140,000 changed hands that day alone. If this doesn't demonstrate the power of group buying, I don't know what does.

Group buying coupon web deals are all the craze these days. Since May 2010, some 20 similar websites have popped up.

Groupon Singapore is the largest of them with some 300,000 subscribers, contributing 'millions' of dollars of sales a month. The Subway deal that saw a whopping 42,000 coupons sold, was the deal-of-the-day at Groupon Singapore.

Group-buying sites work by sending subscribers daily alerts about massively discounted deals. There must be a minimum number of people taking up the offer and paying in advance before it can be activated.

Typically, Groupon Singapore collects half of the proceeds as its commission.

KEEPING DEALS FRESH

For this concept to be sustained in the long term, however, the deals must be fresh and what people desire at the time they are marketed.

Fatigue can set in no matter how bargain-hungry consumers are. For instance, if a site markets nothing but spa packages, how many more people will sign up after a month of being bombarded by heavily-discounted spa packages?

Having exclusive deals is also the way to go - something that Groupon Singapore has done right.

Its exclusive partners in Singapore include Subway, Starbucks, Quiznos Restaurants, Tully's Coffee, BreadTalk, Fox and G2000. What this means is consumers cannot get the same deals on other competing group-buying coupon websites like Deal.com.sg and Liveoffcoupon.com.

Groupon Singapore's 29-year-old chief executive Karl Chong attributed the ease of inking these deals, to Groupon's brand name. As reported first in The Sunday Times, Beeconomic was acquired by US-based Groupon in a US$24 million ($30.2 million) deal in December. Since then, Beeconomic has taken on Groupon's name.

'On our own, we couldn't have done that,' said the co-founder of Beeconomic, who sold majority shares in the company to Groupon in 2010, barely six months after it started operations.

The other fledgling websites ought to take note. This may seem like a lucrative business with a low start-up cost, but it still needs some serious firepower to succeed.

Groupon in the United States has Starbucks chairman, president and chief executive Howard Schultz and Peter Barris, managing general partner of venture capitalist New Enterprise Associates, on its board and global partnerships with brands like Starbucks, Subway and Tully's Coffee.

It will be interesting to see how the various Davids in the industry fare against this Goliath.

FACEBOOK addicts: You may soon find yourselves sharing more than just photos, gifts and emotional outbursts on the social networking site. 

A new study has shown that college students who use the social network have significantly lower grade-point averages (GPAs) than those who do not, according to Time.com.

The survey of 219 undergraduate and graduate students was done by doctoral candidate Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State University and Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University. 

They found that GPAs of Facebook users typically ranged one grade point lower than those of non-users. For instance, users' grades range from 3.0 to 3.5 compared with a 3.5 to 4.0 range for non-Facebook users. 

"Maybe [Facebook users] are just prone to distraction. Maybe they are just procrastinators," Karpinski told Time.com. 

So as not to insult the intelligence of my friends, some of whom are loyal followers of Facebook's, I will only go as far to say that the social network is a huge waste of time. 

I've always wondered why anyone would spend hours updating their profiles and photos on the site, much less incessantly "poking" or "throwing sheep" at people. Too much time on hand? Exhibitionist blogger syndrome? 

Let me suggest a better way to send personal messages. How about an e-mail, a phone text messsage or, better still, a phone call? 

I would save all social network communications for broadcast. It is an effective tool for sending the same message to many people at once.

It is because of the brevity of Facebook messages that some experts associate Facebook with diminished mental abilities.

Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield had in February cautioned that social networks were "infantilising the brain" by shortening its attention span and providing instant gratification constantly. 

UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small also warned of an inability to read real-life facial expressions and understand the emotional context of subtle gestures in his book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.

They could be right. Why didn't anyone think that tagging a friend in a photo uploaded on Facebook without his or her prior permission is perfectly acceptable? What if the friend prefers not to be identified online? 

While I'm careful about who I add as friends and who has access to my personal information, I can't say the same for my friends on Facebook. Their security settings may not be as high as what I've set in my profile, and as such, what they upload about me can be seen by the friends they indiscriminately add to their list everyday.

What do you think about the popularity of social networking sites? Leave your comment here.

Thus far, one thing has gotten in the way: digital rights management (DRM) or copyright protection. This means users can either transfer songs from one device to another for only a few times, or not at all, to protect record labels' revenue.

So the Singapore media's excitement was justified when Sony Ericsson said it was launching a new service that would let its phone users download music free of DRM.

When time came for the unveiling of its big secret two days ago, the Sony Ericsson music service dubbed PlayNow was nothing but a big let down. 

PlayNow is essentially a kiosk, available at seven of its retail stores island-wide. Consumers plug in their Sony Ericsson phones, browse for content on a touch-screen, download music and movies to their handsets and pay for them with a stored-value card.

Why did Sony Ericsson take one step forward and two steps back?

DRM-free, notwithstanding, buying music over a kiosk rather than over the Internet is cumbersome at best. 

With Singapore's household broadband penetration at over 90 per cent, who wants to make a trip down to a Sony Ericsson store to buy music whose format is compressed? 

If I'm going out, I would rather head down to a HMV store for a high-quality CD, whose price is the same as what PlayNow offers (Sony Ericsson's music albums start at $19.99).

Even Nokia and Motorola understand this. That's why the online Nokia Music Store and Soundbuzz Mobile Store let people buy and download music to their phones via their computers.

Just when you think buying music over a kiosk is archaic, Sony Ericsson has to make a bad move worse by making users pay with a proprietary stored-value card.

And it is not compatible with the CashCard either.

They can now pay to guarantee comfort if they haven't had much luck before with such seats (like those on the exit rows), apparently assigned to those who asked for it first. Anyway, what is an extra US$100 for a return trip compared with what they had paid for the ticket?

That's one way to look at it assuming that the booking system is transparent and the seats will not be blocked for premium customers like they used to be.

Putting a price tag on what used to be free will price frivolous contenders for limited exit row seats out of the competition.

This way, economy-class business travelers can have a higher chance of getting the much-needed legroom to work on their laptops. No more having their knees trapped and laptop space violated when a passenger reclines his seat.

It's a small price to pay to lock in your preferred seat and feel you're in control for once.

Such control is especially important since flying no longer offers a hiatus from being connected to the office. Commercial airlines are allowing passengers to yak on their cellphones in mid-air and have in-flight e-mail access from 8,000 feet above ground.

Taking a step farther, SIA should also offer a discount to passengers who opted for middle seats rather than aisle or exit row seats.

After all, didn't SIA say the extra fees for more legroom are not a money-making ploy?

Read Karamjit Kaur's blog entry: Too much of a stretch?

AT EVERY technology conference, there's always a message for the season. The 10th annual IBM Asia Pacific Insights 2008 forum held in Shanghai last week was no different. 

The message that IBM speakers did not fail to repeat: The firm's services are good during both good and bad times. It must have thought that it was time for a reminder what with some Asian economies entering into recession and companies possibly holding back IT spending in the quarters ahead.

Big Blue was referring to its largest revenue generator, Global Business Services. The business unit provides consulting services as well as manages customers' helpdesks, servers and computers on their behalf. 

Companies that outsource get economies of scale - and as such, cost savings - from sharing the same infrastructure used by thousands of other IBM customers worldwide. So it seems its services business is recession-proof.

I wonder, however, if outsourcing one's IT requirements to a service provider used by every other company around the world will produce the same frustrations. You can't get economies of scale and highly-customised services at the same time, surely.

Or can you?

To be fair, IBM has earned its boasting rights. Its Global Business Services division grossed some US$5 billion in Asia Pacific last year, making it the largest IT services provider in the region, according to Gartner.

At the same time, nearly 60 per cent of all change management programmes - necessitated by new technology rollout or internal restructuring - in companies fail to meet all the business objectives. This is based on a 2008 IBM survey of 1,500 managers in 15 countries worldwide, including Singapore.

That figure (60 per cent) is not new. The same failure rate has been thrown up in the last five years at many other technology conferences.

Such a high failure rate only goes to show that using technology - and even having a good tech service provider - is no guarantee for success. There are other ingredients including a sound business model, good leadership and a passionate workforce.