Well, this is it folks, after three more editions, this newsletter, the Network World Web Applications Alert, will be no more. For reasons beyond my pay grade and after something like 2,000 issues, this newsletter will cease to be, it will be no more, it will be pushing up the daisies and will join the choir invisible.
I shall leave my thoughts about where we’ve come from, where we are, and where we’re going to with Web applications for my last edition and for this week, with the topic of imminent demise on my mind, I thought we would ponder our digital finitude.
At some point in the future, we shall each shuffle off this mortal coil and where will your epitah be available? In the age of the ‘Net there’s an obvious answer to that question: On a Web site!
And that, my friends, was the thinking that drove a new company with the rather dark name of I-Postmortem Limited to create I-Tomb, billed as “The World Virtual Cemetery,” for your i-remains after your (real world) death and I-Memorial, “The Guardian of your Lifetime,” for you to construct your own memorial pre-death as well as distribute documents once you shuffle off.
I-Postmortem’s services were launched on Sept. 12 at the DEMO FALL 2011 conference.
The company’s first service, I-Tomb, provides facilities for you to create a virtual tomb for someone who has, er, passed on, and “enables families to keep alive the memory of their deceased loved ones and of their ancestors.”
Visitors to an I-Tomb can light virtual candles, place virtual flowers, and burn virtual incense as well as leave tributes in the form of videos, pictures, text files or any other content they think appropriate.
The other service, I-Memorial, is for you to not only erect whatever digital mausoleum you please for yourself but also provides secured storage for your personal documents such as your will (you know, the one where you leave out your children and bequeath your money to your cats) as well as the details of your secret numbered Swiss bank account. You can also leave audio and or video messages that will be delivered after death.
Of course if you’re going to store such potentially sensitive data you’ll want to be certain that it really is secure (until you’ve gone, no one needs to know that your will includes your “friend” in Atlanta where you go for those “management meetings” several times every year). For this reason all of your sensitive data is warehoused with Safe Host SA, a Swiss company that specializes in highly secure storage.
I-Postmortem (which I think is a terrible name for the company; it sounds like they do autopsies) has procedures for declaring people to be dead along with checks and balances to mitigate fraud which includes checking with you via your email address to see if you are really dead, using people you assign as “declarators” to confirm your demise, and requiring death certificates.
The pricing for I-Tomb is $50 per annum with a minimum two years subscription but no discount for buying more than two years in advance while I-Memorial costs $120 per annum with a minimum one year subscription with a discount for buying several years in advance.
I think the company’s pricing is high and to not offer an “in perpetuity” option for I-Tomb or a “lifetime” option for I-Memorial surprises me. The screen shots I’ve seen of the service show a pretty polished service albeit with a certain cheesiness that seems to accompany anything to do with the funereal business.
I-Postmortem has a small field of competitors and if the company can get the exposure and attention of their target market, they could do well … and that’s the challenge: How many people who are tech-savvy are also inclined towards what the funeral industry refers to as “pre-needs” planning? This will definitely be an interesting company to watch.
