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Paul Hooper wrote: This has triggered an "Information Request" for our business
May I ask what exactly an "information request" is, and what it's for?
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Basically they are trying to determine if we really are who we say we are. The root cause is an Australian Government law to prevent criminals using things like PayPal for money laundering. I actually don't disagree with the concept, just the execution by PayPal.
1. If the law is so important, why was I able to do business for so long without providing this identification to PayPal? Why has asking to look at PayPal Here suddenly prompted this review? I would have MUCH preferred having to provide all this information up front, before PayPal was backed into our processes. This has come out of nowhere and is causing havoc with established processes.
2. Most importantly, be reasonable about things and only lock up money if they have a suspicion that something wrong is happening. In our case, they asked for identifying information (copies of Certificates of Incorporation etc) and locked our account so we couldn't close it. After three request rounds (including things like a "Mission Statement" for the company) where we had provided everything they had asked for, they suddenly increased our limitation to prevent us moving money out of the account and started the farce discussed earlier.
Worst of all, it is like fighting the Hydra. I have never had two communications from the same person.
Grrrrr.
Paul Hooper
If you spend your whole life looking over your shoulder, they will get you from the front instead.
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If you have the stamina it may be worth following this through with your government - on a slightly separate note I have followed some of Senator Nick Xenophon's campaigning and have been very impressed with what he has achieved with regards to a certain money making religion.
I have had a bad experience with paypal where they allowed someone to pay for my software then withdraw the payment claiming it was fraudulent hence gaining the key to my software and distributing it online.
Anything that can help clean up their act is a good thing in my opinion - they have a huge amount of power and need to learn to be responsible with this power.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Paul Hooper wrote:
1. If the law is so important, why was I able to do business for so long without providing this identification to PayPal?
Perhaps because this represents an account change and thus they must now get it.
Or because of the account change they just noticed they never got the information when they should have and now they are playing catch up.
Paul Hooper wrote: Worst of all, it is like fighting the Hydra
They are basically an unregulated bank. The option of course is to stop using them entirely. There are other mobile payment providers.
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You have my deep sympathies, Paul. Over a decade ago, for a few years I dabbled in dealing in S.E. Asian art, mainly to finance my own collection. Going into business resulted in a nightmare with my US PayPal, account, like something out of Kafka. They still have about US $90 of mine, now locked up for eleven (?) years, or so.
And, often, when a collector-client come to the country I lived in, and hired me to negotiate for them using my skills (gained at very high cost) in bargaining in the country's native language with dealers, and helping them avoid scammers, and fakes, the visiting client had their PayPal account frozen just because they were "in" S.E. Asia, with the same kind of Catch-22 demands for information the client couldn't possibly send them proof of, since the documents were back in America, or Europe.
I thought perhaps PayPal had really evolved after its acquisition by eBay, but, reading your story, it sounds like the same-old.
bill
Google CEO, Erich Schmidt: "I keep asking for a product called Serendipity. This product would have access to everything ever written or recorded, know everything the user ever worked on and saved to his or her personal hard drive, and know a whole lot about the user's tastes, friends and predilections." 2004, USA Today interview
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I hope it doesn't go on that long! Lots of our customers want to use PayPal and the loss of PayPal as a payment option would be difficult to manage - far worse than the $1000.
One good factor is that they are "attacking" me under Australian Law. Australia also has a Financial Ombudsman who would be very interested in this sort of thing.
All of this for a business that has been running for 25 years with basically no complaints from anyone. We sell to schools and teachers. I cannot imagine a less threatening scenario!
Paul Hooper
If you spend your whole life looking over your shoulder, they will get you from the front instead.
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They're just making up bullshit, knowing they hold all the cards. Their goal is to make you give up, so they can steal your money.
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IMHO, Harold aptroot is correct, Hooper! BTW, don't get too optimistic about Ombudsman business in Australia. It is another farce with entirely different Hydra monster.
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My sympathies, I moved recently and on hell of a time changing all my PayPal information and I don't think I got it all straightened out but I can use it for purchases. I can only imagine what you're going though.
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Just like the hoops you have to jump through for a code-signing certificate. TONS of fun proving who you are, especially if you're just a person with a DBA thing.
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Not BS, not to be dismissed just because it's only $1000.00 (US), not an issue over which one should lose sleep.
From experience then, but unfortuneatly America not Australia, the Better Business Bureau is the easiest place to make a query about any situation with a company. Next find the state's district attorney's office, online and "way easy" to find a surface address to which a letter of inquiry can be sent. Include all corporate flags found in any "who we are" page of the PayPal corporate listing, a list of chief officers their street addresses, their legal reprentation by name and by street address, the periods of personal business transaction with the organisation, and any other logistical innformation, and be sure to state what you think is your legal right given the circumstance. Chances are you'll get a very fast reply. And if you're lucky a statement to the effect that the company is currently under investigation, if not a legal document case number, presumeably to which your own information has now been added.
Don't expect instant results from either of these contact. Cases take time to go to court.
And now for the downside of contacting BBB and State's Attourney. You open yourself up to subpeona in crimnal proceedings. And although I'll start talking through my hat now that the the word "civil" comes up, how anyone really expects to proceed on gaining access to $1000.00 of their own money based upon "just because it's my money" kind-of-logic, might be something that determines whether you just cut your loses and move on. Today.
That last bit of advice should be taken to heart by anyone who has better things to do than pursue hours/weekks/months/years of fruitless doggedness getting what's owed to them by a company.
In short, drop PayPal. And forgettaboutit.
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I am getting few inquiries about developing few applications in Perceptual Computing. It ranges from New Applications to integrating PerC in existing one. Estimated man hour will be varying from 100 hours to about 800 hours. Applications will be written in C#+Wpf+PerC.
In India, we are getting about $15 par hour(  ). I just wanted to know from US based programmers as to what would be a good contract rate for such applications. I have 10 years of experience and have produced several enterprise, app store, entertainment specific apps. Also if anybody can throw some light on what is the basis rate at which they are outsourced to India would be of great help.
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Unfortunately jobs are outsourced to India because they are cheap. The problem here is not what everybody else is getting because other parts of the world are different economies, you need to compare your rate with what other similar people in India are getting.
For example, depending on the contract and exactly what I'm doing, my contract rate goes from $55/hr to $250/hr. Keep in mind I'm in the Oil/Gas and Offshore control systems industry, I don't write software that does database processing, things I write can kill people if done incorrectly.
If you want to do a real comparison, you need to do apples to apples, the apples aren't the same over here as they are there. Your economy $15/hr may be like $55/hr here, so just a number without context is not going to be helpful for you other than number envy.
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I think if you have an impressive resume, and proof of high-level very specific achievements ... and it sounds to me like you do ... you are in a position to ask for substantially more than US $15 per hour !
But, so much depends on whether or not you have particular skills that make you unique, rare, essential, etc., in the knowledge domains where your competencies lie, and what the current market demand is for your types of competency ... or, more importantly, that you can make the client believe that you are absolutely essential 
good luck, bill
Google CEO, Erich Schmidt: "I keep asking for a product called Serendipity. This product would have access to everything ever written or recorded, know everything the user ever worked on and saved to his or her personal hard drive, and know a whole lot about the user's tastes, friends and predilections." 2004, USA Today interview
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You are living a fantasy. If you quote US, Candadian or European rates to do work then I really hope that the work will go to someone in one of those countries.
Peter Wasser
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa
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No, it wont. 
For the particular type of project, not many can match my skill set! In this case, neither my Indian origin is unknown nor the skills. So in a technical bidding I will outbid just about anybody. My problem at this moment is not competency or if I quote high I loose, it is to know what are the average work pays across these two continents. I don't want to make myself look fool. That is it.
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The rates paid in other countries relate to costs in those countries. Our taxes, rents, compliance costs and living costs are different to yours. We have competed against each other to get the rates to where they are.
Outsourcing overseas costs money also and is quite often (mostly) uneconomical even if the work is done 'cheaply'.
Thus the rate you will charge has nothing at all to do with overseas rates except it must be a lot less to make it in any way attractive.
As for your skill set I am not going to disagree with you except how will you prove this. Whether it exceeds what may be available elsewhere I sincerely doubt.
I say without any intended malice that your expectations appear to be quite unrealistic.
Peter Wasser
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa
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Peter. I definitely understand a little economics. So I am not living in a Arabian Night world.
Take it easy. But to draw your attention on certain issues, I would like to elaborate a little.
A good meal in urban India is $2 max. Three star meal $5. I am not saying I want to quote a US rate for any work. Firstly, most of the Indian IT firms( of any scale) targets service sector. The Product and Services in most of the big firms is 20-80 in terms of percentage. The reason is, getting work from US and Europe has been easy for these guys. In average, IT guys works for about 12 hours a day and $1000 pm is average salary. That makes it about $3 ph. Add to infrastructure and other costs, doesn't go beyond $7 ph. With even $10 ph quote, they make a lot of money you see.
Why do these Indian companies get the projects? Is it for low cost only? Not really. In IT, you have a huge amount of work in testing, back end monitoring and other aspects. A large % of regular IT of the companies are spent on maintenance. This is relentless and thankless job. Obviously you don't want to burden your IT costs by setting aside a huge cost for maintenance? Therefore off-shoring has been a reasonable option, both for service industry here and for US.
Now let us see the skills a little. India produces a large number of engineering graduates every year. However none of the Indian universities rank high in world any more. Does that mean the it is degraded beyond imagination? No, Indian education system was never a scientist producing education. It is still here where it was a decade back, the world has moved forward.
However a say about 10% of these engineers are also quite good in terms of talent and skills. A large percentage of this pool moves to US either as recruits or on onsite, leaving the actual equation unchanged here.
But what needs to be understood is that it is still a good system producing decent enough professional in large number. iPhone is designed once. You don't need designers every day. You need production support. Will a designer work in production support? No, company would no be able to afford it. Indian IT sector has long understood this equation and hence it sustains.
Our case is slightly different. We are 100% product based firm and offer no service. 90% of the business comes from prototyping. This is an area not many professional firms are well equipped with. We have a long pool of Indian clients and we are happy with what we are doing or what we have done. We have also delivered several of these prototypes of clients in US. But that is a different model altogether.
You don't know how long will it take for you to develop an algorithm. The rates are purely based on average deliverable. But some of the clients wants Products with full life cycle which includes service. Obviously you can't expect me to provide onsite sitting in India. So few of my dev friends will be handling onsite. Because my pool of devs are young and largely inexperienced in this sector, I din't get much information from them either.
Therefore I requested an overview to understand economics of contract rates.
modified 28-Sep-13 12:02pm.
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I suspect this should have nothing to do with geographical location, make the bid based on your skills and the clients requirements.
I would probably apply client location rates (which you seem to be doing) and let them try and negotiate it down. I would go to some Canadian job site and look for contracts in a comparative skill set/level and use that as a starting point.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Grasshopper.iics wrote: India produces a large number of engineering graduates every year. However none of the Indian universities rank high in world any more.
I beg to differ. A CS graduate from an IIT[^] can pretty much walk into MIT, Stanford, CalTech and Berkeley, or if they choose, Google and Microsoft. This 60 Minutes segment[^] echoes these sentiments.
/ravi
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Any IIT or NIT CS/EC graduate is a true potential. So 90% of them prefer to leave for US. I have mentioned a 5 also. India produces 3.5L CS engineers every year alone and IIT graduates don't make over 1%. As they leave to US, the equation back home remains unaltered.
One more thing, generally a IIT student can crack any other top exams and they actually have. So, the pool of students who gets into IIT are the brightest of the lot. Having said that, number of publications and referred publication from IITs cumulatively has gone down. http://www.crazyengineers.com/threads/iits-find-place-in-world-university-rankings-are-indian-students-proud.67913/[^]
So as a whole nothing innovative is attributed by IIT as far as Indian IT ethics and practices are concerned.
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I didn't realize almost 90% of IIT grads leave India. I would've hoped more of them remain behind (and possibly work for international companies, but in India). 
/ravi
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Problem is, though MS, Google, IBM has a big presence in India, their Indian operations are to great extend limited to testing, production support, maintenance, and offshore. So true opportunity back here is limited. Since emergence of Apple, few companies like RoboSoft is doing well. But still such companies are limited in number and openings are very low. It is not that Indian companies are not getting new projects, they do. But since over the years the talent grooming mechanism is failed, you don't have great deal of expertise to execute entirely here.
Do do have great talents here too. But sadly exception always proves the rule. Therefore when we talk about Indian IT, it has to be cheap offshore but anything else. So even when we get the opportunity, we need to fight against this general theory.
India is no more a cheap country either. A good flat in Bangalore would cost anything between $75,000 to $1,00,000. Affording a house is almost out of question. So, Indian companies are finding it tough to sustain growth, to focus on innovations and to compete globally.
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Grasshopper.iics wrote: India is no more a cheap country either.
Very true. I've been reading of some low(er)-tech IT outsourcing now being channeled to the Phillipines and Viet Nam. India offers the advantage of an English speaking workforce, but that is becoming less relevant.
/ravi
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