BT are pushing BT Digital Vault, their product to store all of your digital data on, to that end they’ve just launched a Web service to calculate the value of your digital output.
The site lets you enter the number of music tracks, photos and videos that you have and attach a ‘sentimental value’ to each format.
We threw a few numbers into it and it tells us the total monetary value of our digital doodlings is £3,490.
We’re confused as to how they’ve come to attach these arbitrary values to the various bits of media – Music tracks – 79p; Photos – 10p; Videos – £12.
The music pricing is based of the costs of tracks on iTunes. The other two? Photos based on BonusPrint.co.uk and films, Lovefilm.co.uk.
Frankly the valuation service is a bit hollow – but may draw attention to the fact that people don’t have a backup.
Backup your data
Our view is that you cannot attach a value to the photos of friends and family that you have – they can never be replaced, so we’re all for people looking after their data. BT’s Digital Vault is one way of doing this.
One of the major advantages of an online backup service is you are protected against fire in your home, that may well wipe out backup that you hold at home.
BT offer a free service, the ‘Basic,’ which lets you store up to 2Gb of data, but you have to manually copy the data up there. With a price like that, why would you refuse? You’ll need to sign up for the service before 8 Jan 2007, after that you’ll only get 1Gb.
The pay-for service is £4.99/month, but gives 20Gb of storage and an automated backup manager. It’s this that provides the essential feature of any backup system – the ability to not to have to think about it – your data just gets backed up. Sadly the software only works on PCs though.
BT are far from unique from offering this, as there are many other services around.
Other services
One example that has been running for very many years is Iron Mountain Connected Backup, or connected.com as it used to be. Back in our PC days, we used the service on a daily basis as it was just so simple of use – the backup occurred automatically as the machine was shutting down. Prices range from $10 – $75/month for their 30Gb service.
When you look at the amount of storage BT offers for its price, it looks quite a bargain against the Connected Backup.
It’s being predicted that today will be the biggest Internet-based shopping day of the year in the UK. The Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) research points to a massive £180m being spent just on this day, more than double the £82 million average for 2006. 
Just over nine out of every 10 e-mails sent worldwide are junk, with a “spam tsunami” flooding inboxes with relentless junk advertising. 
Because each hijacked PC only sends out a relatively small amount of spam, they’re not detected by anti-spam networks and thus avoid being blacklisted on industry spamlists. 
Spamhaus blames much of the problem on ISP’s who either fail to stop the spammers or do nothing to stop them through mismanagement or good old fashioned corporate greed. 
The UK first case of Web-rage to go through the courts has reached sentencing. 
When Jones opened the door of his house – with a knife of his own, he was severely attacked. 
Microsoft have finally woken up to the fact that people aren’t using their Web server product, Internet Information Server. 
Microsoft will be excited with the comments of Andi Gutmans, co-founder and chief technology officer at Zend, “Since our preliminary work with Microsoft, we have already seen a better than 100 percent performance gain with some PHP applications on Windows Server 2003.” Good start. 
The final version of the Firefox 2.0 browser is expected to be released into the wild today. 
“If your browser needs a restart or the OS asks you to reboot, losing all of those web pages and content is pretty disruptive,” commented Mozilla VP of products Christopher Beard. Ain’t that the truth, Chris! 
Set for a beta launch this month, Scrybe looks to be a ground-breaking online organiser if it lives up to the claims made in the promotional video posted on YouTube. 
Web snippets – complete with bookmarks, graphics and text formatting – can be copied into a categorised Thought Pad interface and integrated with calendar events and To Dos, with multi page documents browsed via a sleek, pop up graphic navigation pane. 
What we think so far
Although the online demo looks amazing, we’ve seen far too many slick presentations be followed up by a hideous kludge of a program, so we’ve signed up to the beta trial and will hopefully be able to give you our hands-on verdict soon. 
Microsoft have made their latest version of their Web browser, Internet Explorer 7, available for download. 
Feature Catchup
Phishing warning
Unhappy with the inaccuracies of the online encyclopaedia he set up, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has announced that he will be launching an alternative to the free online reference this week. 
Such is the explosive growth of the site, this figure represents a whopping 162 percent rise from the same period last year. 
Two UK lads, Gary and Ash, have taken upon themselves to go into Internet chats, posing as a 13 year old girl and converse with various men who happened across them. 