Indian users have just received a intimation that PayPal has resumed the E withdrawals to Indian bank accounts. The further news is that they have also decided to waive off a $5 fee for check accounts. Here’s the email as is:
We’ve received good news. You can continue to enjoy electronic withdrawals just as you did before.
While we have received your appreciation for the advanced notice and the refund of the cheque processing fee, we also have heard loud and clear that you highly value the ease-of-use of our electronic withdrawal service. Our customers are our number one priority and we are working tirelessly to improve our service.
Thank you for your patience and in appreciation for your continued support, we will still provide the $5 USD processing fee refund for any cheque withdrawals made from July 29, 2010 until further notice.
All of us living in India got a surprise this morning in our mailboxes. PayPal has sent an India wide email that Indian customers will be able to withdraw money only via checks through their account. Now, while some non Indians would think that this is just a irritant, allow me to inform you about something that happened six months ago.
A good six months ago, PayPal suddenly stopped withdrawals form Indian accounts into Indian banks. And the Indian customers knew nothing about it, until they started searching the Internet as to why their PayPal payments, which normally come up in a few days time are taking weeks. A quick look through – not that quick, we had to reach the underbelly of the forums – told us that there was some issue between PayPal and RBI, and it would take time to be sorted out. Well, all of us thought that it is better to let the big guys fight it out and stayed silent, until we saw our payments being reversed - even going back to years! Of course, we did lose a bit of money. Not every client who has paid you two years ago for an assignment would be even around to pay you back if your bank reverses that payment, but there was nothing we could do!
Ask any Indian freelancer about the time they spent without a single penny in their bank accounts while their 1000s of dollars were in virtualville, and they will give you some choice adjectives for PayPal.
Neil D’Silva, a veteran content writer who has been working from home since the past five years, has this to say about PayPal:
PayPal has been infested with several problems and it is obvious it doesn’t care about this large market that it has in India.Also it is under the scanner because it is the biggest online transaction medium for India. Will switch over to using Moneybookers till this PayPal problem tides over, as usual.
For a long time, PayPal has been synonymous with the term ‘reliable online banker’, especially for people in the subcontinent because other online payment options are not really viable here. But since the last few months, there have been more than one changes to PayPal’s policies for Indian users which have made it difficult to transact using PayPal. And now disabling the electronic withdrawal system might be the final nail in the coffin. We will have to look for faster and better modes of online payments. I have already started using Xoom and trying out Epass. Maybe its the end of an era, when PayPal dominated online payments
Of course, its not like there’s no alternatives to PayPal, but we just hope that the service we began our freelancing with gets its stuff in order. Here are the alternatives to PayPal. This is a sincere request for everyone working with Indian freelancers to help them out by making accounts here:
The world of contentwriting s fraught with many misconceptions. One such misconception, which I experience many a times, is that I sit around sipping cognac or vodka in a hilly or icy terrain and kiss a beautiful woman good morning before I sit to work on something that is equal to a Harry Potter or a Fist of God – Not true. Most content writers just dabble in fiction, and that too on a non paid basis – until it gets taken up by a magazine or something. What is as true as the above romanticism is false is one single word that makes us or breaks us.
Deadlines.
Nope, don’t scroll down in a hurry. This is not an email sent by your client asking you whether you will be able to meet.. that. I am here to help you. Scroll up and read the red letters, what does not destroy you makes you stronger.
At the cost of being a little over dramatic, I would like to say that we content writers have deadlines, which we have to meet at any cost. I cannot count the number of assignments that I have simply forgotten about a day before the deadline and then given a rush job of it. Of course, the rush job comes back to me with an extended… deadline… because it had too many typos and spelling errors. Sometimes, I go through the document and find that it is not half as bad as I had thought, and if only I had taken the pain to read the document once, it would have passed as a ‘good enough’ document. But yes, between driving from a shopping spree and having a much needed break to coming home and drapping off a urgent e-mail with all corporate niceties ignored, I guess I wouldn’t have the time to read the copy.
But then I think, would it have been helpful if someone had actually read the article to me? Now, I am not someone with easily available relations like a girlfriend or a wife or a niece and a nephew who’d sit on a chair besides me a recite a 1000 word article in a spic and span manner. This quandry of mine was unsolved for a good part of my content writing life until I found Natural Readers.
Natural Readers is a unique software that reads out the article to the user. That’s correct – with the Natural Readers you can simply select what part of text you want read and it will give it out to you as you wrote it – spelling mistakes and all. Once that’s done, all you need to do is to go back to your document and make the relevant changes, and presto! One unmistakably awesome article is ready!
One would remember the ancient Microsoft Text to Speech software that was available way back in the 2000s, when I had my first computer. I had quite some fun with it back then, but I have not seen it anywhere in the Windows 7 OS that I am using. I think Natural Readers more or less makes up for Text to Speech software that was inbuilt with our Operating Systems, as it provides a complete package and caters to everyone – right from the media professional to the content writer.
The most important requirement of a text to speech converter software is that it should read out the required text or document in a natural voice, and a voice that can be easily recognized. Natural Readers offers a natural text to speech experience, which makes it easier for the user to mark out any issues with the document.
Oh, and yes, the software does offer some chances for some text to speech fun, with the possibility of buying some pretty decent voices – something to have the children enjoying once in a while.
You can also convert the document into a Mp3 file with this text to speech software, and it can read emails, ebooks, word documents and even simple PDF files, so this is basically a one stop shop for anyone who wants to ensure that their written word is spellworthy. What’s more, you can even decide which kind of voice should read out your document.
You can also download the free text to speech software, that is basically a stripped down version of the complete software. You can buy the various versions here.
