The PutPlace Blog

This is the second in an occasional series of audio interviews we’re doing with tech gurus and alpha geeks. We’ll be talking to them about how they manage their digital life, where they store all of their virtual stuff and related geekery. Photo by Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com.

You can listen to the interview, or read the transcription below:

• Interview with Vanessa Fox (17:59, 16.9 MB)

Darren: This is Darren Barefoot talking today for PutPlace about backing up your digital life. Today we’re talking to Vanessa Fox. Hello, Vanessa.

Vanessa: Hi. How’s it going?

Darren: It’s going well. How’s it going with you?

Vanessa: Wonderful.

Darren: Excellent. And tell us who you are.

Vanessa: Oh. My goodness. That’s a very good question. Well, I do a number of things online, I guess. I probably am mostly known for what I’ve done in the search industry. I used to work at Google and built Webmaster Central for them. Now, I’m actually launching a new site called Nine by Blue where I’m going to just try to talk about a lot of different things involved in acquiring more visitors through things such as search and social media.

Darren: And so this is the number nine by blue dot com?

Vanessa: Yes, so I’m going to try and make sure to have both it spelled out and the number redirecting to the same place.

Darren: Yes. That makes sense. And why that domain?

Vanessa: You know, it’s very hard to come up with names. I think people who do naming are very skilled. They have a talent that I don’t have. So I spent a lot of time thinking about it and what I really just sort of wanted to convey was the idea that there actually is a lot of data out there about your customers, about your potential customers, and so you can take all those numbers and sort of turn them into something more, something that’s actually an engagement as opposed to just the numbers. ‘Cause there’s just tons of numbers and it’s hard to find what’s actionable. So, you know, really aggregating that stuff in a useful way. Just sort of, numbers into something else. And I just like blue. I like the water.

Darren: Sure. It could have been any color. You went with blue.

Vanessa: Could have been anything. Yeah.

Darren: Maybe you got a spot in this whole — Hopefully, if you’re really successful you can spawn an imitation site which is “Seven By Indigo” or something like that.

Vanessa: Yes, exactly.

Darren: I’m going to go register actually all the other numbers and all the other colors right now just so I can own –

Vanessa: Oh no!

Darren: So somebody’s like “Oh, what was that website? Nine by pink?” Anyway. Actually, that’s a fun way to slice a bunch of domains is by having colors associated with given, kind of, topic set.

Vanessa: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Darren: Not to use a stereotype, but if you had a blog about gay lifestyle it could be “X By Pink” or something.

Vanessa: Uh-huh.

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Christopher, who looks mighty anxious about data loss, won our Pull a Face for PutPlace photo contest:

Christopher wins $200 in Amazon gift certificates and a free 100 GB data storage subscription to PutPlace.

We were up all night sorting through the submissions to our Pull a Face photo contest. Okay, not all night, and there may have been some appletinis involved, but it was definitely a tricky decision. We’re really pleased with all of the photos we received, and we’re sorry we can’t have 45 finalists.

To view and choose your favourite among the five finalists, visit the contest page. Voting continues through August 15.

PutPlace is running a fun little photo contest about data loss. It’s called “Pull a Face for PutPlace”. Here’s the spiel:

Show us your data loss disaster face!

• Dropped ravioli on the new computer drive?
• Forgot where you stored the video files of baby’s first steps?
• Frustrated by uploading 1 file to multiple sites?
• 10 years of data gone in an instant?
  

Enter a photo of your data disaster face for a chance to win an annual subscription to PutPlace for 100 GB of data + $200 USD Amazon gift certificate. 

We’ve all had that terrifying moment where we forgot to save that term paper, budget report or what-have-you. Or, even worse, when your hard drive just up and quits. Channel that energy and focus it into a JPEG.

Its official, we are now in public beta. What does this mean? Well right now if you are a Windows user you can register and download our client software. With our software in place you can backup all the content on all the computers your own.

Big job? Not with PutPlace. We do all the heavy lifting and our client is smart about backup so you don’t have to be. Duplicate files are detected by the client so we don’t scarf up all your bandwidth uploading redundant files. On the server all those copies are linked together so you don’t pay out top dollar for storage either.

Once we’ve backed up all your stuff we watch it in real-time and backup all the changes as they happen. What about old versions? We keep ‘em all safe for you online.

Need all your bandwidth or CPU? Turn PutPlace down or turn it off. When we startup again we’ll catch up to where we were in a lickety split.

Upload as much as you want the beta is free. When we move to a paying model in the future we’ll give beta users several months to decide whether to go with PutPlace or somebody else and we’ll move your content there for free (if we can).

So get uploading and send us your feedback.

As avid users of Firefox, PutPlace is delighted to help sponsor the FireFox 3 Dublin launch party alongside Blacknight, Segala, Wubud and BT.

The venue is CineWorld on Parnell St, Date 19th June 2008, time 7.00pm to 1.00am.

Registration to attend is required. Over 100 people have already registered so make sure you get your name on the list before it’s closed.

While PutPlace has a different take on backing up your digital life, there’s no denying that we’re in the online storage space. As such, we’re always keeping an eye on what other players are doing.

In the process of our research, we compiled a big spreadsheet that records, among other things, how much free storage space each service offers. We thought we’d share it with the world, in case you needed to store, like, every episode of The Simpsons online.

A few caveats: we ignored email services like Gmail, and any service that offered less than 250 MB of free storage. We found two services that offer theoretically unlimited storage. However, MediaFire limits file size to 100 MB per upload, and Omemo applies a peer-to-peer storage model that seems pretty complicated for the average Normal Human user.

For the record, here at PutPlace we offer 2 GB for free. Sign up now to join our exclusive beta program.

With no further ado, here’s the big list:

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I demoed the close to final version of the public beta today to some interested investors. We are currently fine tuning our EC2 grid and will start processing beta invitations in earnest in the next week or so. If you have been waiting for your account to become live you shouldn’t have to wait much longer. We appreciate your patience.

Joe.

Here’s the first time I pitched PutPlace in public.

TV4B videoed me at the NextWeb conference last week giving a quick overview of PutPlace. Unfortunately the video has expired and I’m not sure its worth 400 euro to keep it up there.