Hatem’s Diaries

I heard last year about OneCard.net, when they won the 2nd place at the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology Award : Raqmi 2006. The idea is pretty simple but interesting, Onecard aims to replace all cards available in the market. Instead of buying Jawal, mobily, Internet, DSL, hosting … or any others cards, you buy just OneCard and then you can use it for any of the available services.

Mohamed Zagzoog, owner of zwjate.com one of the service supported by OneCard, told me that the service is pretty known and it’s generating good sales for his website. I have a problem with mobily because they don’t offer online payement for prepaid accounts, while AlJawal offer it for everyone, so I registered at OneCard to give it a try. They are using Alahli credit cards processor, which is also my bank, so I paid online with the minimum 50 SAR. After buying credits, they quickly called me to confirm my identity. Then from the website I bought mobily credits, and the card is instantly available. Simply neat, and I will definitely use it instead of growing my card’s collection at home.

Today a friend just pointed me that lots of new countries have been added to paypal support including : Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, and Yemen, to make the total supported list above 200 countries. But as usual only Send feature is available for these new countries, which make it somehow useless without the withdraw feature. Hope withdraw will be available soon, at least by check or US bank account at least. And welcome to new countries to spend more money.

I was playing with CafePress and my new cartoon and got this result : Hatem’s Shop Interesting idea for bloggers to sell something original and monetize their blogs, maybe to get famous too ? I used the free version of CafePress in addition to the $50 for my iconized photo, that’s not a big budget to run a small business for fun. If the for fun shop works well, you can later expand it and get a personalized shop for $59.95 per year with CafePress or use any free shopping software such oscommerce or others.

After so many years, Paypal, the worst payment system worldwide, is finally available for Tunisia. Even it’s very bad, it’s a solution for many e-commerce websites which accept paypal for their products and services. Tunisia is one of the few arab countries which paypal opened their service for them like : Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates.

Anyway to get full profit you’ll need a credit card, or probably start a small business and start accepting paypal payment. But, currently you can only spend your money since withdraw funds isn’t yet available. Probably when this feature will be enabled in the future it will be a great alternative even if paypal fees are very high compared to many other e-commerce solutions.