@dvocable

Web18 seems set to become the destination for your social bookmarking needs, video and music sharing, online travel portal, start up page, feed aggregation, and emails. Their latest venture, In.com, so apparently, is a huge effort in this direction. If the name, targeting all those who yearn for small email addresses, doesn’t strike you, then check out the features. These guys must have figuring out hard all this while on what kind of online sites tick well with the masses. And when they did, they assembled all of them together in one. So now you have your Digg, YouTube, Gmail, MakeMyTrip, Netscape, Zapak, and JukeboxAlive under one domain. That’s the story.

Do I like it? Definitely. In fact, I dare say this is finally a web 2.0 site from India after a long time that I honestly like. The design and look are neat. The music and video streaming is fast even on my dialup. The email service is with a whopping 10 GB space and I particularly find it quite thoughtful that they have introduced folders, made compose editor or for that matter every mail that you read open in a new tab. The inbox page is clean and they don’t insert any ad on the footers of emails that I send to my acquatntances, like our so big Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail do. Plus, In.com is a 2-letter good name (it has supposedly costed Web18 2 crores) to have an email with and being new, you can have all the mayank, sita, teena, and what not @in.com, instead of going for the tenna20008 type usernames.

In.com doesn’t have to worry about the news. They aggregate it from other sites. Maybe many people would prefer that instead of having one publication house to read the news from.

What the site lacks is the functionality in some areas. Site navigation can still be a pain. if you venture somewhere as when you are adding your feed or reading a feed, you cant find the go-back buttons so easily. You cannot move back to any part of the site from your inbox.

Would I prefer In.com over gmail? Unlikely , but it can definitely become my second best and I can close down my Rediffmail, Yahoomail, AOL, and Hotmail.

I hope they keep the site clean and don’t insert ads like there’s no tomorrow, something so characteristic of web18 sites.

Final words: This site is here to stay and so watch out, Indiatimes and Rediff. I cannot yet start comparing it feature by feature with the biggies like Gmail and YouTube, that won’t be fair, but I think web18 has got it right.

For users like us, all I can say is grab your ID before anybody else does (provide your mobile phone number not email for instant invite code on the site) and the ad campaign starts.

Having written an article titled ‘10 cool ways to use Paypal‘ on Mashable, I expect myself to be a bit smart using the service :-) Thankfully I managed to save face four times.

Recently I received four phishing mails with the subject ‘Critical Information Regarding Your Account’. The emails were designed to look like they were from Paypal. The contents read:
—————————————————
Dear PayPal member

You have recently updated your PayPal account according to our standard security procedures. Unfortunately the update procedure failed because some of the information you provided was incorrect.

Please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and update your personal records.

However, failure to update your records will result in account suspension.

To update your PayPal records click on the following link:
Some link….http://

Thank You.
PayPal Service Department
——————————————————-

The first time I received the email, I ignored it. But when I received a similar mail for the fourth time, I thought I should just check it out properly. Two odd things I observed while reading it:

1. Although the sender’s display name was Paypal, the email domain was ‘ipaypal’.

2. The link mentioned on the mail was http://www.paypal.com/………., but when I hover my mouse over the link, my Firefox’s status bar showed me the actual link, which starts with something like http://ogk-d………

I forwarded the mail to spoof@paypal.com and they confirmed it was a phishing mail (email attempts to steal your identity, password, or other financial information). You can visit Paypal’s Security Center to learn more.

Related post: Withdraw Paypal money in Indian bank account now

This is probably the greatest news for Indian Paypal users. Paypal has now started a new service through which you can withdraw your Paypal money to your Indian bank account.

The banks where you can withdraw your Paypal money are State Bank of India, Bank of India, Canara Bank, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, ING VYSYA Bank, Axis Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, HSBC, and Citibank. The money transfers will be completed in 7 working days and are free of cost for transfers above Rs. 7,000. For transfers below this amount, there is a charge of Rs. 50.

The best of this news is that there are no minimum or maximum withdrawal amounts for verified Paypal users. For unverified users, the upper limit is USD 500 per month though.

You can add your bank account by going to your Account Overview page and hovering your mouse on the Profile subtab. A drop down menu will appear. Click the ‘Add or Edit Bank Account’ link and on the page that follows, fill your bank account form. Pretty easy.

This new development means no more transferring Paypal money to our US relatives, or using other money transfer services. In the absence of this service, Indian users have been using services like Xoom and Virtual Money International ATM card.

Guess Paypal has finally recognised the rising Indian market.

Read more about this here.

paypal