Last May, Aulia wrote about a group buying site from Hawaii named PlayHawaii that expands its business to Singapore and Indonesia by changing its name to Maiplay.
Now, when you access PlayHawaii, there is a different logo. This daily deals service has been acquired by CrowdSavings. CrowdSavings is a daily deals established since 2009 and based in Florida, US. Chad Jaquays (President and CEO of CrowdSavings) also informed this acquirement to PlayHawaii users.
As cited from HawaiiWeblog.com, Jon Sugihara (co-founder PlayHawaii) explained that although Crowdsavings is from America but it has commitment to focus on hyper-local-Hawaii market. Besides that, its official account and FB Page are changed into @CS_Honolulu and CrowdSavings.com Honolulu.
Alright. We’ll back to the previous discussion. In May, PlayHawaii has expanded to Singapore and Indonesia. In both country, it changes the name to Maiplay and uses two different domains. It uses Maiplay.com.sg for Singapore and Maiplay.com for Indonesia.
Some of the users also send complains on its official FB Page Maiplay Indonesia, but Maiplay doesn’t seem give any response. The last status update on its FB Page is on August 19th, 2011 while the last Tweet on its official account @maiplay_indo is on August 1, 2011. Both show that the last deal offered to Maiplay users is on August 2011. No other deal is offered after that. It can be inferred that this daily deals is closed, and the one in Singapore is the same.
However, Maiplay Singapore with maiplay.com.sg is still available to be accessed although there is no new deal offered. The interesting thing is the Maiplay Indonesia domain Maiplay.com changes completely to a new startup in mobile segment named Perx (getperx.com). It seems that the Maiplay.com domain is only used as redirecting for this startup, Perx. This startup is a further plan of Jon Sugihara and Andrew Sato to focus on Asia market. In addition, it is planned to be brought back to Hawaii.
Pext itself is a startup based in Singapore and offers its service on mobile app field. By now, it is available only on iOS platform, yet it soon releases its service on Android platform. From the official Twitter account @getperx, this startup has been launched on October 17, 2011. In my opinion, this startup still focuses on daily deals service but with different concept and little bit similar to Bouncity.
The story about Perx is actually a different story. However, the question is about Indonesian market for group buying – daily deals. After some daily deals no longer provide their services and the story about them came into publicity such as DetikDeal and Maiplay, will any other daily deals become out of business like them?