Memory-sharing platform 1000memories today announced the launch of the Shoebox scanning app for iPhone, the first mobile tool designed for digitizing, organizing and sharing collections of photos from the past.

The app gives individuals, families and organizations the ability to scan and instantly share large collections of photos and documents that have previously been difficult to digitize – the photos traditionally neglected in shoeboxes, old family albums or archived analog collections.

We connected with founder Jonathan Good via Skype to talk about Shoebox. Unfortunately Jonathan’s video froze just after the recording began.

“Large photo collections from our past have never been digitized or shared because it’s been too difficult and time-consuming. With the introduction of the Shoebox app, we’re putting multiple hand-held scanners in households and organizations, for free,” says 1000memories co-founder Rudy Adler. “We’ve created a tool  that allows people to upload and share old photos in a fraction of the time needed for traditional photo scanning, which will dramatically change the rate at which these collections are being shared.”

Using the latest technology, Shoebox can auto-detect the edges of a photo and then quickly crop and straighten accordingly. Users can then add information typically written on the back of old photos – such as dates, names, and locations – before uploading to the 1000memories.com, where it can be organized, shared and discovered by friends and family.

1000memories hopes to help users get their older collections of photos online and in order while their friends, families and communities still remember the stories and people behind them.  “The captions, dates and tags are just as important as the photos themselves – it’s imperative that we get as many of these photo collections online as possible while we can still access the stories behind them,” says Adler.

The launch of Shoebox comes on the heels of the release of the iPhone 4S, and will take advantage of its significant upgrades in mobile camera technology, including an 8.0 MP sensor for high-resolution mobile scans, as well as an improved f2.4 lens, for quality lower-light scans.  The app will remain compatible with all previous iPhone models, including the iPhone 4, 3G, and 3GS, as well as the iPad.

“The popularity of the iPhone camera has proven that people want something that’s quick, accessible, and easy to share,” says Adler.  “For us, that’s what providing a social mobile scanner is about – making it as easy as possible for people to get their photo collections digitized and shared with the people they care about.”

Here’s the commercial prepared by the 1000memories team.

DSwiss AG, the specialist providers of high-security Internet services, announced today the launch of SecureSafe, a new service incorporating their existing DataInherit service. The launch of the new online service, new iPad app and enhanced iPhone app offers users around the world increased security, functionality and mobility.

In addition to the new name and look of the service, SecureSafe also includes some notable enhancements such as: accessibility to the file safe not only from a browser but also via the iPhone or iPad app; a SecureViewer™ that provides guaranteed security when viewing documents on a PC; and additional security based on Apple’s recently launched iOS5 platform. DataInherit remains as a feature of the new service guaranteeing users long-term storage and preservation of their data.

“Over the last year we have expanded our footprint to include banking institutions as our services provide an innovative extension to existing e-banking offerings. With the new name SecureSafe we underline the fact that our Internet data safe is the digital safe deposit box of the future providing an electronic version of the traditional bank vault,” explains Christian Schwarzer, CEO of DSwiss.

With SecureSafe, customers can still choose from a variety of account options to suit their particular needs such as the entry level ‘SecureSafe FREE’ up to the premium option, ‘SecureSafe GOLD’. The enhanced usability and features ensure that there is a package to suit every level of user with an underlying assurance of maximum security which is what DSwiss has become renowned for.

Dead Man’s Switch Beta

Earlier this week Dead Man’s Switch released a beta version. In an email to users founder Stavros Korokithakis announced the beta and hinted at new features to come.

The new version only contains about the same functionality as the old one, for now, but we would appreciate your help in testing it. We have planned for it a multitude of features, such as configurable intervals, file attachments, different ways of checkin, etc, but we need your help to make sure that everything is working properly.

We can only speculate that the underlying code received a rewrite to serve as a foundation for new features to come.

DataInherit Password Import For Firefox

The folks over at DataInherit tweeted about a quick and easy way to get started with their service by exporting saved passwords from Firefox. It’s a great way to get started, but also a great opportunity to remember those accounts that you may have forgotten about. Detailed instructions are available on their website.

World Without Me

World Without Me is a new digital estate planning and posthumous email service that’s in closed beta right now. Based in India, the service offers “Dispatches” as emails scheduled for the future (not just at death) and a “Vault” for storing usernames and passwords. More interesting is the “Footprint” component, which is an aggregation and archive service for social media:

It’s your Journal that treasures everything you did and thought about. Archive you digital footprint to create your autobiography on the go. Aggregate everything digital of significance (Facebook status updates, Tweets, Emails, and Documents) and share it with only the ones that matter.

Our email boxes are full of messages from new digital afterlife services. We’ll be adding those to our growing Digital Death and Afterlife Online Services List soon. If you have any industry news to share, feel free to drop us a line.

When I started researching the digital afterlife in 2008, I felt as if nobody was discussing the topic. We found a few posts here and there, but information on the topic was sparse. About a year ago I decided to take a look back and see what I could learn about the early days of death and the Internet.

I know from some of the early academic works that online memorials were present well before 1999 (I’ve heard some say as early as 1994). I wanted, however, to focus on milestones surrounding pre-planning, such as posthumous emails and digital estate planning. To keep this from being completely overwhelming, I’ve included only those events that were an industry first or unique in some way. Feel free to suggest additional dates.

Digital Afterlife Industry Timeline

Today Entrustet announced a new service, the Entrustet Digital Property Search. Traditionally Entrustet has focused on pre-need digital estate planning services, but this announcement marks a shift in that focus as they add this new at-need offering. Essentially you can provide their automated system with the email addresses of the decedent, and their tool scours the Web for lost or forgotten accounts.

“Ever since we launched our Account Guardian service, we’ve gotten emails, blog comments and phone calls from families of recently deceased or estate planning lawyers going through probate,” said Nathan Lustig, co-founder of Entrustet. “They always asked us for help for their clients who didn’t preplan. After about the 10th call, we decided we really needed to do something and the Digital Property Report came out of it.”

This is only the second offering we’ve seen in this space for families of the deceased seeking to discover and access their online accounts. The other is Digital Estate Services, a New York-based company that’s essentially a locksmith for digital devices and online accounts.

The announcement cited the cast of a 42-year-old individual who passed away suddenly. The report generated “16 online accounts that otherwise would have been lost, including a business domain name that was set to expire in 30 days.”

The information is pulled solely from publicly-available sources. To avoid any security concern caused by aggregating this information, the report is only available to attorneys, family members or executors. The requester required to provide an obituary to Entrustet as proof of death.

From our perspective, this is a welcome service, especially considering that many executors are not technically savvy and unable to search for this information on their own. That said, our advice at The Digital Beyond is to tread carefully when exploring online accounts of the deceased, especially if their wishes are not clearly expressed.

The fledgling digital death industry is beginning to have some published success. We are seeing companies publish more facts about venture capital and how many users they have.

1000Memories

Mashable reports that “1000Memories, a web service that helps digitally honor the memory of a loved one, has announced that it has closed a $2.5 million series A round of funding from Greylock Partners.” This after their successful graduation from Y Combinator and a $500k angel round from a list of “all-star” investors.

Read the Mashable article about 1000Memories.

DataInherit

DataInherit is reporting that they have “more than 30,000 customers in over 100 countries.” They also report that they have two new investors funding their operations and development.

Read more about DataInherit’s success.

MemoryOf

MemoryOf is reporting that they now have over 91,000 memorials. While many will be free accounts, these kinds of numbers are promising sign for the new industry and shows that the memorial market is growing stronger.

Legacy.com

Legacy.com partners  with newspapers to post obituaries and provides digital memorial services. From their website we learn:

“Legacy.com hosts obituaries and memorials for more than 60 percent of the people who die in the United States. The site attracts more than 10 million visitors monthly and hosts obituaries for more than three-quarters of the 100 largest newspapers, by circulation.”

Read the article at legacy.com.

Do you have business news to share? Contact us and let us know for our new Industry category.

Over the weekend the folks at Entrustet unveiled a new homepage for their site. Co-founder Jesse Davis told The Digital Beyond that they wanted the new homepage to be “more lawyer/company/consumer facing instead of just solely consumer.”

And in case you haven’t heard, they’re spending the next six months running Entrustet from Chile as a part of the Startup Chile program. A new country and a new homepage within one week? Sounds like a good week to me.

Here’s a look at the old and new homepages:

Old Homepage

New Homepage

We interviewed Nate Lustig, co-founder of Entrustet at Digital Death Day 2010. This is another of several interviews with digital afterlife leaders recorded at the event. You can listen below or read the transcript.

Interview with Nate Lustig

Evan: This is Evan Carroll here from The Digital Beyond and as you know I have been at Digital Death Day, and this is another in our series of podcasts from Digital Death Day. Right now I am sitting down with Nathan Lustig he is the co-founder of Entrustet, another of the digital afterlife services and of course you can those at our Online Services List at the thedigitalbeyond.com. Nathan, would you tell me a bit about Entrustet and what you do?

Nathan: Sure, we’re a free online service for people to go in and make last wishes for digital assets. Digital assets are any online account you might have or file on your computer. So when you pass away or before you pass away we would like you to go in and make your last wishes. So you can say if you would like your online assets deleted or transferred to an heir.

Evan: I know you have another service you call the Account Incinerator. Would you tell me a bit more about that?

Nathan: Sure, so Account Incinerator is going to be launching in mid to late June, and what it does is it privately deletes any account you wouldn’t want anyone to ever find. So you can use your imagination on what sort of accounts would be there. The way it works is you put that information in and then the Entrustet experts go in and delete it for you so no one ever stumbles upon it.

Evan: How can I be sure that the Entrustet experts won’t release that information?

Nathan: It’s part of the contract that we won’t do it, but you are just going to have to trust us.

Evan: I understand. So like I said, we are here at Digital Death Day, and we have had some very engaging conversations. We’re actually nearing the end of the day. Tell me what the most meaningful thing you heard here today was?

Nathan: I think the most interesting part has been the conversation that has developed around what the terms of service should be for companies and what companies should use as their policy. One of our main focuses is trying to help companies, through our corporate partnership program, learn about these sorts of issues. We’ve been working together to try to figure out what should these baseline points be. Because we believe at Entrustet that it’s not something that the laws catch up to, it going to be consumers forcing companies to create the ability to transfer and delete accounts according to their wishes. It’s been really interesting to hear from a wide variety of perspectives on what the best way to do it is.

Evan: Very good, that is very interesting stuff. So We’re talking a lot about the future here and what’s going to happen next, in your mind what’s next for the digital afterlife community?

Nathan: With the growth of the Internet and how everybody is online, in the next ten years everyone is going to have their digital assets either in a will or in a service like ours or there has to be some way people can manage their digital assets after they die. I think that going forward it’s going to be a growing industry especially with more companies coming into it every day, more like every week not every day, lots and lots of companies are coming into it and it’s a quickly growing industry. I think that as people get comfortable with it they are going to be signing up for services like ours day after day.

Evan: Very good. Well Nate, thanks for taking the time and sitting down with me and with our listeners at The Digital Beyond we look forward to hearing from you in the future.

Nathan: No problem!

One of the things I struggle with most is describing the value of planing for your digital afterlife. I often get the response “but won’t I be gone?” It’s salient that a big opportunity in this space is a solution that provides both immediate and long-term (after death) value. It’s been out for a few months now, but the DataInherit Password Safe for the iPhone does just that.

The App makes it easy to sign up for an account and begin storing passwords almost immediately. Like other digital afterlife services, your passwords are kept securely and you can specific who receives access upon your death. I really like the idea of having this information readily available when I need a password and when I change one. Kudos to the DataInherit team for a great tool.

It happens. Computers left behind by a loved one become locked boxes. Accounts become frozen. Treasured digital assets are lost. Now a new service is available that helps survivors unlock digital content.

Digital Estate Services (http://www.digitalestateservices.com) is here to help. Their service can help unlock local files, recover user names and passwords for online accounts, and find important documents from a spouse or loved one’s computer in the event that they didn’t leave access.