Webaholics

Most people dont know that theres something called WEP and WPA in wifi devices such as the Linksys router.

When you setup a wifi at your home or office, it becomes and open source for internet. Who ever has a laptop or a wireless device within range of your router, can access the internet, or even hack into your local pcs, if the connection is left unprotected.

To protect these, there are two options that usually come with all wireless devices, called WEP and WPA. 

So go thru your router’s manual and make sure that you enable this before starting to use the wifi connection for everyone’s safety, unless you really want it to be an open connection.

Consumers have the right to save money. They dont really have to buy something when the same thing or something else of the same quality is available for a lesser price. Analyzing prices of higher end products such as cars and stuff might not seem very stressful, but what about the lower scale stuff that we have to use in our day to day life and have to consume very often, things like diet pills for example?

Thanks to the interne,t there are vebsites like consumerpricewatch.net that showcases such products and displays the best price of the products and give you rich feature comparision of all these products, giving a clear picture for the clients who wish to buy them and get benefited.

There were about 4 sites in India that made online trading easy for anyone in the 2000s. The most sophisticated on at that time was bidorbuyindia.com which was in colloboration wiht a South African company into the same business Bidorbuy.co.za. There was also a similar site called bidorbuy.com.au which was a site that targetted australia.

Then there was another site called baazee.com. A dumb looking site at that time, hosted on vsnl, dead slow, stupid script and no features and an ultra ugly rating system. The software was horrible, and their mails most of the time landed in spam.

The third one was auctions.indiatimes.com in which people could sell anything. This was the first one to close down.

The 4th one was the dumbest, was popular 7 yrs ago, but forgot its name. Apart from these there were several chota mota sites that were budding and vanishing now and then, but they didnt have much activity.

Bidorbuy lost interest in India and Australia and sold its Indian site bidorbuyindia.com to baazee.com and bidorbuy.com.au to Ebay. Thats when baazee started to get its good looks. All features of bidorbuyindia.com were imported, and after about 5 days of downtime, baazee.com emerged as a beautiful trading portal around 2002. Baazee has created its own payment gateway similar to ccavenue’s gateway called paisapay, and offered gateway services to its clients for Rs 2000 as one time registration fee, and about 2% as TDR, which was claimed from the client, something that was supposed to be borne by the seller.

auctions.indiatimes.com stopped registrations of new users initially, then suspended its existing users one by one for one dumb reason or another, and started auctioning its own products.

Later in 2004 or 2005, baazee.com was sold to ebay.in a country specific site of Ebay, the world’s largest portal for online trading. Ebay brought in several new policies like buyer protection systems, freed the payment gateway and made it open to everyone, and did several things to protect the buyer’s and seller’s from any mishap.

But later on, Indiaplaza.in formerely known as fabmall.com, and several other sites such as shopping.indiatimes.com, shopping.rediff.com emerged with better prices than ebay, and people prefered to shop there, where all products sold are monitored by rediff, and when you buy from rediff or indiatimes its their direct responsiblity to guarentee delivery of a good product.

Ebay still doesnt do much to ensure the credibility of the seller, whild rediff and other online shopping sites do that. Ebay still remains to be a site where collectables are sold more than conventional items. Sellers these days are preffering to tie up with sites like these rather than ebay. In ebay you could get anything you wish for that you might want to buy descretely and not off a medical store in front of everyone, like diet pills and weight loss pills.

Nigerians are playing a great deal at ebay. Scammers from Nigeria buy your item at ebay, then send you a mail saying that your payment will be made thru Western Union and once we receive the products the payment will be delivered to the seller. New sellers at ebay, who dont know what is what, and without a good warning or alerting system from ebay, they fall for this and end up loosing the money. Ebay does not support this, and at the end would come up saying that we cannot pay for a mistake that you have done, in page 643, para 74 line 24 word 56 says NOT, which is a part of the sentence that says You should NOT ship an Item before receiving payment.

I have seen several people who sell google invites for Re 1. It is ofcourse illegal, and if google finds out they will block all the email accounts created with the chain of invites ( Gmail didnt have open registration untill very recently, you needed invites to sign up). They sell these invites not to make money. They never care if the buyer pays or not, and he pays the ebay minimum fee of Rs 3 for the sale. This they do just for the sake of building a database of ebay users, whom they can spam later n get some offsite orders for the products that they offer. Activities of this sort have been regulated too.

I have tried to sell hosting on ebay. If you search for indyahozting in google, you will find listings of ebay pages more than those of my own site. I didnt find ebay very friendly, they just blocked my id just because i included our support email id, and mentioned that the client can mail this id any time for support, in the Ask the seller a question area. I have never been to ebay again.

For books, fabmall is the place. For electronics rediff is the best. and for Home appliances like refrigerators, microwaves, auctions.indiatimes.com is the best, where you will get a better deal than in any of your local dealers. It is heard that they buy in real bulk, and they can afford to ship it at a very low cost, and therefore maintain the prices low.

The popular Japanese companies that have been making cameras for ages were making them for Film cameras. And they have been making films too. When the world became digital, people thought that these companies would go out of business and that only companies that specialize in electronics would make good cameras. Well there are Panasonic and Sony cameras, but even today in the world of digital cameras Nikon rules.

They know how to make lenses. And when taking a photograph, it is the lens that matters, and makes sure that you get a good picture and the part played by the film or the digital CCD is quite low. Ofcourse it is important, but anyone with a bit of technology can make a good CCD and Nikon should be stuffed with money that it will not really have a problem to set up its own R&D to develop a good CCD for its cameras. Nikon still rules the world, and the box camera people will never realize it.