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Digital Afterlife
A Madison based company is helping users manage their online accounts from beyond the grave.
Reporter: Barclay Pollak Email Address: bpollak@nbc15.com |
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Posted Sunday April, 25, 2010 -- 4:20 p.m.
Tucked away in a small office above the Wisconsin Veterans Museum you'll find Jesse Davis and Nathan Lustig, co-founders of Entrustet: one of the first companies dedicated to handling your digital assets after death.
Davis says, " You can literally go online and for free organize all of your digital assets."
Davis got the idea a few years ago while reading "The World is Flat" by Thomas Freidman. In the book, Freidman talks about Justin Ellsworth--a soldier who was killed in Iraq--and how his family had to fight for access to his Yahoo account after he died.
Davis says that got him thinking and led to the discovery of Entrustet.
Davis says, "What if Justin didn't want his parents reading every single e-mail correspondence that he'd ever had with anybody. Maybe he'd wanted the account passed on to a girlfriend you know somebody else maybe he wanted it deleted all together. "
According to Lustig, the software allows a person to either assign an heir or have their digital assets deleted.
He says the company covers sites like Myspace, Facebook and Flickr that may just have sentimental value; but that they also cover sites with monetary value.
Lustig says, " If you have a blog that generates money, or if you have an online business or if you have domain names and no one can get access to that your survivors will miss out on an economically valuable potential windfall. "
The company launched its website last week. So far 550 people have signed up.
That's more than they expected and they believe that number is going to rise. The company is already growing. They just hired 8 part time employees.
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