Useful Information

In the last few years, phone tapping and email interception has become rampant.

This article on email interception and phone tapping in India  explains how it is done.

It appears that many times this facility is misused to harass people or get information on business rivals.  A month ago , emails sent to 2 of my email addresses disappeared.  I contacted the ISP , who gave me complaint numbers , but  are unable to give a logical explanation for the same even after a month.

I hope there will be  greater transparency in the system in future.

Many Indian personal and premier Paypal account holders appear to have received the following email:
In compliance with Indian regulations, if you are selling products and services to customers globally, please review the following important information:
• Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services should be withdrawn to your bank account within 30 days.
• While making the withdrawal please make sure you select the purpose code that best fits your business.
• Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services may only be withdrawn to your bank account in India. This received amount cannot be reused for making purchases.
• If you would like to make purchases on any website that accepts PayPal, you can continue to use any credit card issued by a bank in India.
For any questions, please reach out to our customer support teams by following the steps below:
1. Log into your PayPal account
2. Click “Contact Us” at the bottom of the page
3. Click on “Send Us” an email or “Call Us” to reach us by phone

Not all Indian Paypal account holders have received this mail . Initially many thought it was a phishing email, but later Paypal has confirmed that the email is genuine. Also Gmail seems to have flagged the email as spam.  They have also not specified a date from which these rules / restrictions will come into effect.

The biggest restriction is:
• Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services may only be withdrawn to your bank account in India. This received amount cannot be reused for making purchases.

The main disadvantage of this rule is that a Paypal account holder will lose money in transaction fees – when you withdraw to your Indian bank account in Indian Rupees, you lose 2.5-3% in currency conversion fees and when you again pay through credit card, the credit card company will charge up to 5% as currency conversion fees for converting the Indian Rupees back to US Dollars. Also many people in India avoid getting a credit card, since many Indian credit card issuers are notorious for their poor service, inaccurate billing and hiring the services of questionable collection agents. 

Paypal checks are sent by ordinary post and take up to month to delivered. The status of bank withdrawals of many Indian account holders on or after 7 April 2010 is shown as pending. Of all the online payment processors, Paypal seems to most regulated in India because it has the largest number of users in India and uses NEFT.

Update 14 April, 2010  : There seems to be a problem with Paypal withdrawals to bank accounts in India on 7 , 8, 9 April, 2010  and their status is still shown as pending.  Withdrawals on 10 April 2010 have been credited to the bank account . Some users have requested cancellation of the pending withdrawal, but they may incur a foreign currency losss and it is not clear whether the  forex loss will be credited back to the account

From this list of   Radio Taxi  operators  the major radio taxi services are:
Meru Cabs – Mumbai , Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore , Phone number : 4422 4422
Easy Cabs – Mumbai , Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore , Phone no. : 4343 4343
Mega Cabs – Delhi, Mumbai and Chandigarh
Orix Infrastructure – Delhi and Kolkata

Cab services with lady drivers – Forshe and Priyadarshini

At Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport , there are toll free phones which you can use to book a cab from either of these 4 services. The customer care number for Meru Cabs and Easy Cabs are from their website. The waiting time at their call center is often 5-10 minutes and you may not get the cab you want. 

The radio taxi service is usually expensive compared to other modes of public transport.  For a distance of about 15 km, a rickshaw will cost Rs 105- Rs 140 depending on the traffic and route taken , while a radio taxi can cost Rs 350+.

ICICI Bank
For credits into ICICI Bank NRI accounts:
Nominal foreign currency conversion charge of INR 25 (inclusive of Service Tax). In case, of cross currency conversion there will be a charge of USD 1, EUR 0.5, GBP 0.5, CAD 1, AUD 1, SGD 1, AED 4 and JPY 100 (inclusive of service tax).
For FC Cheques sent on Collection, correspondent bank charges and courier charges as incurred will be additionally levied, wherever applicable.
For credits into ICICI Bank Domestic accounts:
Provisional Credit (Credit in 8 days) -0.25%, subject to minimum of Rs. 350. There will be a foreign currency conversion charge of INR 25 (inclusive of Service Tax).
Non – Provisional Credit (Credit in 21 days) – 0.125%, subject to minimum of Rs. 250. There will be a foreign currency conversion charge of INR 25 (inclusive of Service Tax).
The charge for cross currency conversion will be USD 1, EUR 0.5, GBP 0.5, CAD 1, AUD 1, SGD 1, AED 4 and JPY 100 (inclusive of service tax).

HDFC bank
FCY Cheque Collection and Lockbox (FCY personal cheque, FCY DD’s and TC’s sent for collection) 0.25% of INR value (Min. Rs. 250/- per transaction)
Plus Courier of Rs. 50/- per cheque
For Transactions value upto USD 500 – Rs 200/- per transaction plus courier charge Rs. 50/- per instrutment
Foreign Exchange Conversion Fees – Rs. 90.64 (plus service tax and education cess)

Foreign Exchange Conversion Fees charged by HDFC bank seem to be higher than those charged by ICICI bank

Beneath the gloss and hype of press releases in the mainstream media, is the real culture of a company – whether the company is really the law abiding corporate citizen it claims it is.
Only when you deal with the company either as a customer, vendor or an employee, do you know what you are up against.

Asian Food Worker has some interesting insights into the culture of intimidation and harassment of certain companies.

Tata Photon plus  USB broadband connection is available as a prepaid and postpaid connection.  The postpaid connection can be ordered online at Ichoose.in but the prepaid option cannot be ordered online.

Earlier the price was Rs 3500, but now it has been reduced. The prepaid connection details from
http://www.tataphoton.com/tata-photon-plus-prepaid.aspx are:

Get a TATA Photon Plus Prepaid connection at Rs. 2399/-

Get 1 GB Usage free valid over 1 month with every new TATA Photon+ USB Modem

Recharge Vouchers

If you call 1800 420 8282 (the number specified on their website) , they will take down your phone number and the customer care executive will promise that some one will contact within 48 hours, but no one will contact you.

From http://ibnlive.in.com/blogs/jaimonjoseph/326/61644/has-paypal-given-you-problems-yet.html

One lakh seventy thousand Indians regularly receive or send money abroad, through the online banking website PayPal. Actually, about 1.6 million Indians are signed up for the service, though not all of them are regular users. That’s according to Anuj Nayar, Director of Global Communications, at PayPal.com.

There are many blogs that claim to cover India’s online industry , but this is one major segment that they conveniently ignore. Facebook and Twitter are the latest fad (slowly replacing Orkut and Myspace), but if they are down, people’s lives are not affected. Nowadays, in many companies in India, the amount of time you spend in office is an indicator of how “hard working” you are, and when there is no real work , employees spend time on these social networking websites, boosting their traffic.

Websites backed by big media houses have the resources to send out Press Releases and get media coverage, but rarely spend any time understanding the customer needs. Most of these companies and their employees have a very patronizing attitude if you are not well known, but in fact their audience is usually limited to India and NRIs, while many online publishers work with advertisers through out the world.

Also motivation levels differ. An employee with a big media firm will just be doing a job, compiling information from various famous websites, at the end of the day they will get their salary. On the other hand, if you own an online business, you are always experimenting with new things, you have to understand the market, find reliable business partners. There is no replacement for practical experience online.  The big companies can hire hackers to sabotage your business, hoping you will sell your websites. But no one can take away what you have learnt, and you can always start again from scratch.

From

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2010/03/13/stories/2010031352990400.htm

‘.in’ registrations have crossed six-lakh mark. Of total registrations (6.1 lakh), as much as 3.8 lakh registrations have been booked in India and 2.3 lakh overseas.

From

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2009/12/15/stories/2009121551320400.htm

There are nearly 1.4 million domain names – an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet – registered in India. Of this, .COM is around 800,000 and .IN around 500,000.

While there are 35 million Net users, there are only 1.4 million domain names registered from India – translating to 2 per cent as compared to 25 per cent in the US; 17 per cent in Europe; 9 per cent in Latin America and 7 per cent in China. The poor response in India is due to lack of awareness among companies and individuals on owning domain names.

Though  India has a large number of  I.T professionals and software companies, most of them are service providers and this attitude continues with respect to the internet.  While providing services are low risk, they are also difficult to scale without hiring a lot of people.  Developing a money making website is difficult, especially when you are in India and have limited options,  but it finally depends on what your long term goals are.

Many people in India prefer to create content / applications for social networking websites like Facebook, Orkut and Linkedin, but if you create the same content on your own domain name, it opens up many options for you.   A domain name costs very little (.in domains cost less Rs 100 now for the first year) and can create value in the long term.

Trying to compile a list of  secure email clients based on feedback from users.

Most corporations use :
Groupwise
Lotus Notes
Microsoft Exchange

For home users and small businesses, the popular email clients are:
Outlook Express -  Not suitable for a large number of emails.
Thunderbird – common error, This folder is being processed. Please wait till processing is complete to get messages.
MS Outlook -  seems to be the least secure email client, can easily be hacked.

Plain text is always the best, the possibility of malicious scripts getting downloaded are minimized. Other options are:
Poppeeper.com
PocoMail
Popcorn by Ultrafunk
Kmail (for KDE on Linux)
Pine (replaced by Alpine)

Last week I received confirmation that some mail sent to me never reached my in box ( in fact mails from that sender have not been reaching me for this month).  I  am trying to trace the problem,  and these articles provide some information.

http://askbobrankin.com/missing_emails.html

http://luxsci.com/blog/wheres-the-email-the-case-of-missing-or-disappearing-messages.html