Happy Dragon Boat Festival

Happy Dragon Boat Festival to all!

Today (6th June) is the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival and it happens to be the replacement holiday of Agong's birthday for many people. Most of the Malaysians celebrating the festival would be at home enjoying the delicious dumpling. Yummy!

For some of you who don't know the origin of Chinese Dragon Boat Festival, it is a day to remember a great patriot in ancient China, Qu Yuan, who loves his country so much and committed suicide when his country fell apart. So, some people started to commemorate him by eating dumpling and some competing in dragon boat race.

But what means more to us is definitely the delicious dumplings! And many varieties of them! Other than preparing dumplings ourselves or getting help from our parents or relatives (Well, this is the easiest way), there are not many options left for us. Fortunately for people in China, Taiwan and some other countries that are already accustomed to group buying, it is not surprising they actually order their dumplings online from group buying sites!
In China, 85Cafe which featured dumplings deal in group buying sites sold over 10 thousands coupons in less than 2 days. Many outlets of 85Cafe even ran out of stock due to the incredible sales. Similarly, many group buying sites are also taking advantage of this holiday period to provide holiday packages, restaurant discounts and many other deals to attract more customers. We hope to see more great deals coming from the group buying sites so we get to enjoy more for less!

Well, for now, it's time to enjoy my next dumpling (Oouugh...)

How did the name "Dealshelve" came about?

JW came up with the idea of aggregating group buying sites so three of us got together and started to develop this site. First thing first, what should we name our site? Finding a suitable name which is not lame, available with domain name and acceptable by everyone wasn't an easy deal. A lot of brainstorming sessions were held but every time we discussed about the naming, it came to a dead end.

Interesting names that came up were dealsnetwork, dealspull, dealsradar, streetgrab, gooroops, deeyell... One day while imagining our site as a shelf that collects and stores the group buying deals, the name deal-shelf appeared. However, dealshelf.com is already taken (well, it's common that domain name with words in dictionary has been taken by someone though there's no real site for that domain). Shelf reminds me of p4 shelve, one of the command in Perforce, the favourite command in my favourite repository system. And the good news is the domain name dealshelve.com is still available!

It's not a great name, but it isn't lame and dealshelve.com is available. Literally, shelve means to put on a shelf or arrange on shelves. Cool, it describes the function of our site perfectly. So, nobody objected and we agreed to use this name until we came up with a really impressive one... But at the end we didn't came up with any name that is better than dealshelve.com. (I wonder how long it took AD to name his son Julian?)

So, that's how dealshelve.com came about. We hope that people like the name, or at least not hate it. By the way, do pronounce the name correctly, it's "deal-shelve", not "dell-shell" or "deal-chef"... (oh wait, dealchef seems to be a good name too!)

Dealshelve.com, bringing all deals together

Malaysia's leading group buying deals aggregator (or deals portal) dealshelve.com is now in alpha release. Group buying is one of the hottest online purchase phenomenon started at the second half of 2010. Group buying gives you the ability to purchase a product or service at a significantly discounted price when there is a guaranteed number of people committing to the same deal. It creates a win-win-win situation for the merchants, consumers and the deals websites.

Dealshelve aggregates daily deals from Malaysia's group buying websites and host them in one place. All deals are aggregated from Malaysia's most popular daily deals sites including GroupsMore, MyDeal, MilkADeal, Dealmates, Everyday etc. and also from the new comer sites! It is estimated that Malaysia has at least one new group buying site being created in the first half of 2011. Dealshelve enables users to easily navigate and filter out deals from these websites.

A preliminary release of Android App from Dealshelve is also available from Android Market for free: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dealshelve