£1m hope

Jun 19 2009 by Andrew Jackson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

ESSEX lad and cyclist Steve Trister wants to raise a million pounds for the British Heart Foundation and he’s had a couple of great ideas to make it happen.

The first is to ask a million people to donate a pound each. The second is to make as much use of the internet as possible which makes a lot of sense if you stop to think about it. Millions of us spend tiny amounts like that on MP3 songs from the iTunes Store or other music services so it shouldn’t take a lot of time to think about donating another quid to charity.

You can start off at www.1poundchallenge.co.uk to find out all about Steve and his idea. He’s doing more than that, though. You’ll also find him on Twitter at twitter.com/1poundchallenge where he posts frequent updates of donations so far and how his cycle training is going.

There’s a month to go until the deadline, and a long way to go to reach £1m. You can also donate via Paypal, text message, or directly from Steve’s website.

Fundraising has been turned upside down by the internet. Gone are the days when people took sponsor sheets to their neighbours. Now most people use services like Just Giving (www.justgiving.com) to set up their own online fundraising stores and simply email their friends for support.

Everyone wins – online payments are secure, easy to do when it suits the sponsor and the money gets collected upfront so there’s no need to chase people after the event.

As of last weekend, Facebook launched ‘Facebook usernames.’ Until now, your Facebook profile page had a meaningless web address full of numbers. Now you can grab a vanity address there, a bit like having a personalised numberplate on your car. So if you want to own facebook.com/yourname, you can. Trouble is, people with common names will have to be quick. It’s first-come, first-served, and there’s only one of each name to go round. Log into your Facebook account to get started.

Music download site eMusic.com has always been good value. A few years ago you could pay £15 a month for 90 downloads or 17p per song. Last week eMusic announced new price plans which aren’t quite such good value. Now the basic package costs a tenner for 24 downloads – 42p per song. Still, on the plus side, eMusic has just signed a deal with major label Sony, so there’s more songs to choose from.