I-TOMB - Live Forever Online

[tysroby]

We all know people who spend their lives on the Internet. Now they can spend all of eternity there — as long as someone is willing to fork over $50 a year.

An entrepreneur is offering virtual tombs in a cyber-cemetery and has already raised $2 million from investors for the macabre startup.

Jacques Mechelany, who heads I-Postmortem, is hoping that people will soon, so to speak, be dying to sign up.

He’s running two sites; one of them called i-tomb.net.

For the annual fee, a person can set up his own tomb, or that of a loved one.

Those left behind who want to visit will no longer have to walk through creepy cemeteries and get lost among strangers’ gravestones.

With just a click of a mouse they can visit the tomb, add digital flowers or candles, personal messages, streaming videos or photos memorializing the life and times or the deceased.

It can be set up so anyone can visit, or only friends and family.

A related site — i-memorial.com — costs $120 a year and automatically sends computer messages to friends and relatives of those who just moved to the Great Beyond.

Subscribers can also use it to store wills and instructions about their funerals.

Some 54 million people are expected to die around the world this year — and Mechelany, whose business is based in Palo Alto, Ca., hopes to make a fortune on the previously untapped market.

He got the ghost of his idea about 20 years ago, when he reviewed a leather-bound photo album his grandmother had left him.

It dated back to 1870 and showed early photographs of long-deceased relatives, but without any words explaining who each one was.

“I said to myself, ‘I know what they look like, but I don’t know anything about them.’ “I thought nowadays, we can do so much with technology.

“We have an ability to leave traces of our lives not only for our children, but for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.”

Source: New York Post