Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

Well last year’s experience of MCD online tax paying had went smoothly, this year was a little different, some minor glitches along the way.

Firstly MCD tells you that they issued you a password last year, my property tax receipt didnt have any password, people have suggested emailing MCD to get a password.

Anyway once you are through with registering and all, the new interface has the advantage of clubbing all your tax payments together, so you can take a print of your receipt any time you like. You might also be able to make multi property payments (not sure about it).

Anyway the payment methods multiplied this year, now you can pay online via Axis Bank gateway, HDFC Bank Gateway and ITZ Cash Cards. You can also pay with cheques by depositing them in select HDFC and Axis Bank Branches. But who uses a cheque when you got a credit card , they do charge a transaction fee though, to offset the gateway costs.

I paid with my HDFC Credit Card. The site does not support verified by VISA or Mastercard Secure Code which was disappointing to say the least. Verified by VISA and Mastercard Securecard add an extra layer of security to your transactions.

The payment went smoothly, but then the MCD site had another glitch. The receipt wasnt being generated, finally i realised the problem. The pdf receipt was being generated as a .do file, so i renamed it to .pdf and finally my property tax payment was complete online.

Ah well, i am very much in love with the great service offered by futurebazaar.com, and its no news to most people. Therefore i was disappointed when my recent orders took 2 weeks to be processed and delivered. My first ever futurebazaar.com order took only 3 days to be in my hands. But since then while their service in general is impeccable towards me, the loss in speed is very much noticeable.

Recently i had placed a large order with them consisting of 4-5 items, and the last of them were delivered only 1 month after the order had been placed which is slow by any standards.

One of the items costing around 600 rupees was received broken, but Futurebazaar was kind enough to get it replaced. The item was picked up from my home within 2 days by their courier (not TNT) and seamlessly a new order was placed and i got the item in a short period. But coming back to the speed issue :

All these speed problems point to the fact that futurebazaar.com is working on thin stock and has been having problems with fulfilling orders due to small stocks and when they do run out it takes a long time for them to replenish stock. The average shipout time on their site is constant at 4.8 days for a loooooong time now and it seems they have stopped updating it for obvious reasons. They use Bluedart couriers which are definitely one of the fastest in India, so the problem is not the courier.

Whatever the problems hope futurebazaar.com ramps up their supply chain management and is able to deliver fast and good service like i am used to from them

Also it would be great if futurebazaar.com actually gave AWBs to people after orders are shipped, Indiatimes and Homeshop18 have this facility , then why not futurebazaar ?

Is anyone at the future group listening ?

A lot of us aren’t aware that MTNL Delhi telephone bills can be paid online with credit cards, all you need to do is follow the steps :

1. Log onto http://billalert.mtnl.net.in/ (Note: If link is down, try again in 1-2 days, sometimes their server goes down) and click on register to register a user for you and your telephone number.

2. After creating your user, login and see the left hand side menu, click on add telephone.

3. Fill in your telephone number and CA number which is available on your bills.

4.Now whenever you login and click on unpaid bills , you should be able to see the currently unpaid bills and pay them via the pay button which takes you to an ICICI bank payment gateway. You can then pay via your VISA or MASTERCARD.

Now wasn’t that easy ? I personally have been using this method for the last 2 years and have only once faced a problem when i made the payment twice (my mistake ) , anyway the problem was taken care of by contacting the MTNL accounts dept. pretty easily.

Disclaimer : We do not endorse any payment method, post is for informational purpose only.

Well the following companies have asked me to go paperless till now

• Airtel
• HDFC Bank
• ICICI Bank

What that means is that i will only receive email statements and not the regular courier ones which they have to send. Most companies will tell you its to save trees. Infact Banks and credit card companies are pushing paperless financing. But do they really care ?

Well the answer is this :

While there is no doubt that going paperless will effectively help save trees, the fact that most companies hide from you is that they also save money. Logistics costs, postal costs, printing costs, paper costs,envelope costs are all saved when companies discontinue paper statements.

Most companies however see this environment aspect as a way to pocket money and evoke an emotional response in customers. Airtel being an exception did offer monetary incentive to people discontinuing paper statements in the form of a special offer.

However correct me if i am wrong ICICI bank and HDFC Bank did not offer any incentive to discontinue paper statements. They would rather pocket the money saved rather than share it with the consumer.

The money saved is substantial for most institutions, email statements cost virtually nothing to institutes. So the next time someone pushes paperless statements in your face, ask the bank how much money its saving on you and ask them to either give it to you in kind or donate it in your name.

We were the first to report on how the alleged price decrease by Tata Sky seemed to be an increase in disguise. ESPN Star Sports too realised this, and when its their channels which were left out, they wanted to kick some Tata Sky behind.

So they released an ad comparing the rates before and after the alleged decrease and confirmed what our readers knew for a long time. That Tata Sky tried to make us believe that there was a price drop. In fact the alert fooled us into thinking that a price drop had happened, but actually the price has increased for the same amount of channels as the ad by ESPN Star Sports clearly shows.

Now we too subscribe to Tata Sky and would want to see them in the green as far as profit goes, but not at the expense of its subscribers including us. The figures used by ESPN Star Sports seem to be correct.

Greenpeace has come out with an aggresive subvertising campaign against the proposed TATA port which poses a risk to the turtles which inhabit the area. Greenpeace has made a lot of claims in the advertisement which you can see. The power of internet is huge and Greenpeace looks all set to use it !

Subvertising refers to the practice of making spoofs or parodies of corporate and politicaladvertisements in order to make a statement. This can take the form of a new image, or an alteration to an existing image.

Disclaimer: We cant verify the authenticity of various claims, the video is not hosted on wisetechie.com