Uconomix

Fuck you PayPal!

Uconomix 1 Comment

Another day, another fuck up from you. Like I wrote just a few days ago how you did not return me the money in the name of currency conversion, another scumbag customer raised a dispute today and again you took away $12.33 under the garb of currency conversion.

Just called your customer support with regards to the money I have lost and I was told that I will not get credited for the money lost in conversion. I was told I just have to bear that loss! PayPal will happily keep MY money!

Just want you to know that you guys suck!

I guarantee you that you will not have me as a customer for long.

I know you just don’t give a shit about me and my business. And this rant will just be another one in the long list of people you have pissed off.

This is why I am always on the lookout for a PayPal alternative

Uconomix 34 Comments

I use PayPal to sell my software online. It’s good enough but at times there are incidents which make you say WTF!

As per RBI’s rules Indian users of PayPal can not keep the balance in PayPal. It has to be withdrawn immediately. So PayPal initiates an automatic withdrawal every day to your bank account. Yesterday a withdrawal for $199.04 was initiated. When money is withdrawn from PayPal, PayPal first converts it to your local currency and then it sends it to your bank. So the $199.04 was converted to Rs. 10,363.01. PayPal’s exchange rate is pathetic. My bank would give me a better rate if PayPal sent me USD. But PayPal wants to make the most money whatever way it can so it sends me INR and takes a small cut in currency conversion. Besides they also need to give a cut to the partner bank because eventually its a bank (Citibank) that transfers the money to my bank. But that is something I have come to accept as a necessary cost of doing business Internationally.

This withdrawal was cancelled because an asshole who had purchased uMark last month decided to chargeback. Chargeback is the ultimate weapon for a buyer and for a seller selling intangible goods like a software license key, there is absolutely no protection. So PayPal cancelled the withdrawal and credited my account back with $186.38. $12.66 less. Why? This was not because of the chargeback. Chargeback was for $34 and that would be taken from the balance later on. That was because PayPal converted INR 10,363.01 to USD and which according to their pathetic conversion rate came to $186.38.

The buying and selling rates of currencies are always different. In this instance PayPal behaved as if I sold Dollars to them for Rupees and then sold the Rupees for Dollars. This has not happened for the first time. This happened numerous times in the past and after a few emails, and some phone calls they will credit the difference back but it will take days and a lot of wasted time. But if you don’t call them the money is gone. There was actually no currency conversion because the withdrawal was initiated and cancelled almost immediately. It was only some automated conversion entries in the database, something PayPal can easily correct if they want to. But they won’t.

The moment I find an alternative for PayPal which is cheap, easy to integrate and allows me to charge customers in USD, I am off.

Update on 7 May 2013:

Just had another case of a cancelled withdrawal. Again $12.33 went missing and when I called the customer support, I was told the money won’t be credited back! It’s a loss! Forget it!

Yes PayPal will keep my money just like that!

How to combine panorama photos together? Use PhotoJoiner.net

Programming, Technology, Uconomix 0 Comment

Lot of cameras have a panorama mode where you can take several photos which can be combined to make a long photo that covers a very wide viewing angle. But not all camera have option to actually join those photos together. You may also want to combine some photos to make a collage or a strip of photos so what do you do?

Presenting PhotoJoiner.net – a free web app to join photos together. Upload a bunch of photos, select whether you want to join them horizontally or vertically, set a margin between photos and the colour to fill the margin with and you are done. Download the joined photos with the click on a button.

Check it out.

uMark for Mac launched

Programming, Uconomix 0 Comment

Finally after working on it for over a year, we launched uMark for Mac fulfilling one of the oldest demand from our customers for uMark.

I had released original uMark for Windows back in 2005 and since then it has gone through a lot of changes. I had ignored the software for a couple of years but it kept selling and finally when I decided to quit the software services business last year, I decided to concentrate fully on uMark. Few days back we had launched an online version of uMark at uMarkOnline.com that allows watermarking one photo at a time and now we have uMark for Mac. Next up is uMark 4 for Windows and then uMark for iPad and Android tablets.

The programming credit goes to Arokkia! :)

uMark for Mac can be downloaded from http://www.uconomix.com/Downloads.aspx

PS: The awesome screenshot has been created by using place it by breezi

Add a watermark to photos online without installing any software

Programming, Uconomix 0 Comment

uMarkOver the last weekend I built a free online version of uMark – my photo watermarking software. Now you can go to uMarkOnline.com and quickly add a text watermark to a single photo without installing any software on your computer. It will work in any browser that supports HTML 5 Canvas. So it won’t work on Internet Explorer version 8 or prior but works just fine in IE 9 and latest versions of most browsers – FireFox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Works just fine on most mobile devices as well include iPhone, iPad and Android.

So make sure to bookmark www.umarkonline.com and use it next time you want to add a piece of text on an image.

For more options like adding watermarks to a bunch of photos at once, to add more secure watermarks like tiled watermarks and multiple watermarks and stuff there’s always uMark which is now free in it’s basic mode.

Bidding adieu to IT services

Entrepreneurship, Uconomix 9 Comments

I started Uconomix in 2005. The intention was to build a company. A large company over a period of time. It’s been six years and I have seen lots of ups and downs. I started the company from a spare room in my house and moved into a proper office with a team of 8 at one point. Now I am scaling down. On May 31st I have stopped working on the IT services. All the people are gone except one.

What exactly is IT services?

In simple language, IT services is creating computer software for clients as per the requirements and maintaining it on a daily basis – fixing bugs, adding new features etc.

Why am I getting out of IT services?

It’s a bread and butter business
Providing IT services is not much different than working as a daily labourer. Difference being we work from an Air Conditioned Office and get paid more. But only if you are an employee. If you are an employer, it’s an earn-from-clients-and-pay-employees game for you. Revenue is directly proportional to the number of programmers you have.

Running a small IT services shop is a challenging task. Your playing field is way too small. The real juice and money lies in big mega contracts. Small companies only get small projects, small clients and small profits. Just enough to pay salaries of the team and the owner. And there is no inherent value of your business if you don’t have recurring income clients. And that is no different than a job.

It’s also a restless job. Yes it’s a job. 24×7. You will get a call from client at mid-night, on a weekend, on a vacation. And they expect you to take care of the problem immediately. Because they know you are a programmer and you have the means and capability to provide an instant solution.

People problem
IT services business is all about people. Employees want more cause larger players are paying more. If you can’t pay to that level good people will leave. You cannot really afford to pay that kind of salary because your client does not pay you what an Infosys’ client pays. Cause if client could afford to pay more why would he come to me in the first place? He would rather go to Infosys. So it’s a catch 22 situation.

Lack of passion amongst programmers is another reason. Nobody likes fixing bugs in code someone else has written. The best projects that pay well are also the lowest quality! You don’t get anything new to learn. That’s why they are most profitable because there are no challenging tasks, less chances of bugs, and overshooting the estimates. Really smart programmers will never work on such projects for long. They will move on no matter what you pay them.

And most of the new guys just get in the industry to make a quick buck. Nobody really cares about developing a solution for client’s problem. Everyone just thinks of it as writing code as per requirements.

Projects that go on forever
Software is funny thing. It’s too damn subjective. And there are One thousand dependencies. You take care of them all and your code will break on the issue number one thousand one! It will go on back and forth, forever. No matter how well you have defined the scope of the project, some items will never be agreed upon. Requirements will change constantly because clients are humans and humans are full of ideas. If people on the team change, new people will bring new ideas. Projects that are stretched beyond a limit start costing money to both sides and after a while the software becomes a nightmare for everyone. Seemingly simple tasks take so many iterations.

Client will say I need a registration form. You say it’s a couple of hours job. And you do have the form ready in couple of hours you show it to the client on your server. Now the game begins. Client will ask for changes in copy, font, colors, thank you message. Hey can you also capture the IP, the date of birth, the date of separation, number of cats, number of puppies your dog has, count of people killed by Rambo in all movies?! If you say no, client has the ultimate weapon, I won’t pay until this is added – its a small job. Yes its a small job but lots of small changes make it a big job!

Then you move it on client’s server. No one has the FTP info. It takes three days to get FTP info from client’s host then the email is not working. You spend your time figuring it out on client’s server why email is not working. And there you are. A simple registration form took you a week! Then client will say I will test this for a week and then pay you for the couple of hours!

It’s a small incident, but the story for larger projects is no different. Projects are stretched, you don’t get paid but you still have to pay the salary to your programmers.

Tired of begging money
It reminds me a dialogue from the movie Coolie starring Amitabh Bachhan. Bachhan works as a coolie and he says “Majdoor ka pasina sukhne se pehle use apni majdoori mil jani chahiye”. A labourer should get his wage before his sweat disappears. I wish it was true for IT industry as well.

Clients will never pay on time. Especially the Indian clients and especially the large Indian clients. One Indian client of ours paid after 1.5 years! A large fortune 500 company! That is ridiculous. They won’t pay any advance, they won’t pay in phases. And they won’t pay your usual rate. Why do you work for such clients then? To get the dues of the last project cleared you have to accept more projects!

As a businessman you are constantly thinking of meeting your costs for the month. A programmer working on a project is better than the one sitting idle. So you get sucked into the vicious circle. You start thinking in the terms of – Ok this project covers 3 programmers’ salary for a month. Take it. And you get taken! And once the project is done you virtually have to beg for your money from the mighty client! And client won’t pay till the nth grammatical error is fixed for the 835th time.

No clear direction
Seriously I was just running day by day. I had no goal whatsoever of where I want to take my business in one year, two years or five years. Business is good and you tend to just play along. And I spent six years doing just that. One day I woke up and said to myself. WTF am I doing? I was doing a job! I was going to office, communicating with clients, working with my programmers and coming back home. Taking a vacation a year and the life was a drab routine! This is definitely not what I had in mind when I started the company.

May be I was never into IT services. I never really wanted to become next Infosys or Wipro. IT services was meant to be the bread and butter that will find the development of the real thing. Products! But that never really happened. Way back in 2006 I had created uMark – my first product and at one point I was selling 100 licenses a month! Life was so good. But the IT services side was so better then because of its seemingly larger cash flow that I virtually neglected the product for next 5 years! Biggest blunder of my life!

But better late then never.

So what’s next?

I am back to products. I have let everyone on my team go except one guy named Arokkia. And we have just launched a new version of uMark. I have many more products ideas in mind and soon I will decide upon the next product.

I was really inspired by the story of Nirav Mehta. Nirav is one guy I have always followed. Nirav was my first boss at Magnet. He inspired me to start my company. Magnet was in fact a breeding lab for entrepreneurs. Many of my ex Magnet colleagues are running their own small companies today. Nirav’s is an amazing story. He made Magnet really successful in IT services business but then had to scale down drastically probably because of similar circumstances. But he rose back like a phoenix. He built a products business from scratch. His success story was probably the impetus I needed to make the tough decision to close my IT services business.

I am lucky that I already have a super star product in uMark with more than 3000 customers. As I write this post, my existing customers are upgrading to the latest version of uMark and I don’t have to beg for the money! And I know that my software is making some difference to their lives.

Bye bye IT services. I will not miss you.

Where are the brains?

Uconomix 2 Comments

We at Uconomix are in process of recruiting some bright programmers. Posted the opening on Naukri and as expected flood of resumes is coming in. We have set up an online logical test comprising of only 10 questions on maths, logic and reasoning. Some 900 candidates have taken the test so far. Results – only 59 have managed to score 7 or more, only 20 have scored 9 or 10 and only 12 people have got perfect 10.

A good 359 people have left the test midway and never submitted the answers. And from those who have completed the test, the average score is 2! :O

We have interviewed 20 or so candidates so far and recruited two. Hunt is still on as we want to recruit 2 or 3 more.

I am wondering how can people who have Engineering and all such degrees with wonderful academics be so stupid!

Sample one question -

Bill purchased a chair for $200. Next month he sold it to Tom for $150. Next month he purchased it back for $180 and then sold it again to Nick for $220. Did he make profit or loss in the entire transaction? How much was it?

We have people writing all sorts of answers to this question, some say he made loss some say he made a profit. Some sample answers -

No Profit No loss
26.9 %
LOSS of Rs.20
Profit 90$
YES HE MAKE A PROFIT OF RS 10

Most of the candidates concluded that he made a loss. But some 45 people actually thought he made a profit on the entire transaction! I would like to borrow some money from these guys!! :P And I don’t understand why did many of them use “Rs.” in the answer. The question mentions the figures in Dollars. This gives us a hint how much attention a guy is paying to minute details.

A large computer education institute invited us to their center to recruit some of their students. 27 students took our test. Highest score? Four!

This is pathetic! I am worried. I am shocked! Where are the brains??!! And what will these people do in their lives? This is common sense!! An average Indian holding a college degree is so stupid?

This is not about job readiness. People can be trained for a job. But what about intelligence? How do you make people intelligent? How do you compel them to use their brains? Programming is all about logic, Engineering education is all about maths. People are not able to solve simple maths problems!

I ask people a question in Interview – “If 2 typists can type 2 pages in 2 minutes, how much time does it take for one typist to type one page?” One minute! Promptly comes the answer!! I look at the candidate straight faced and ask “take some time, give it some thought and tell me again” They think and give some answer. Many stick to 1 minute. Their interview ends in the next 5 minutes.

Why is common sense so uncommon!!??

And now a new office

Personal, Uconomix 2 Comments

I am buying an office. The first one that I will be owning. It will have a capacity for a team of 10-12 + one cabin for myself :) Its not big, but it will be mine! It is situated in a wonderful glass facade shopping mall which has been converted to office complex called Sej Plaza. It next to my school. Railway station is nearby so it will be very convenient for my team members to commute. Deal will take a couple of weeks to conclude.

I am excited! Its raining new for me these days. New car, new office, badhiya hai!!

1 2 3