"Geikiyasu" Zone in Hong Kong

A 23-year old Hong Kong guy founded this company called 激安 zone (the first 2 characters are from the Japanese word Geikiyasu, which means super cheap) online http://www.gigonzone.com/ and has a platform on facebook. http://www.facebook.com/gigonzone

The website negotiate offers with shops and restaurants but the offer is only valid when a fixed number of people are interested. For example in the first offer shown in this page that if there are 30 people interested in buying "rice dumplings" (a festive food for the Tuen Ng/ Dragonboat Festival in June 16), they would be able to get this rice dumpling at 50% off. So far only 8 people have signed up and there are only 2 days left for the registration.

This offer is not that popular as the savings is small (around US$5) and that is not a particularly famous restaurant. However, there are some that are oversubscribed.

This site is not making any money yet according to the interview with the founder (http://hk.news.yahoo.com/article/100523/4/i67o.html - sorry it's all in Chinese) but restaurants and shops that have partnered with them have said that this is a great advertising and marketing opportunity, particularly for the new and smaller businesses when they could not afford a large marketing budget. Sometimes the participants of this offer might be small but they could successful attract a bunch of new customers who might not be living near the locality and can successfully spread this by word of mouth. The visibility of the offer on the Facebook page also pays off from the over 18,000 members "liking" the page.