This is going to be a real cluster*&^% once some fool downloads garbage into the RF chip.....
Microchip tombstones keep boomers heard from beyond graveBy Misty Harris, Canwest News Service June 19, 2010
Article LinkGenerations of Canadians have died with uncertainty over whether they'd be remembered. Baby boomers, however, won't be taking any chances.
Ensuring virtual life after death, new microchip-enabled headstones allow the Me Generation to share their stories from the grave, with passersby simply swiping markers with a cellphone to retrieve biographical details -- everything from the deceased's political beliefs to their favourite recipes.
"My wife and I had just lost relatives and found it so underwhelming, in a sense, to know that these people had contributed so much and yet their lives were being summed up with just names and dates," says John Bottorff, founder of Objecs, the Arizona company behind the RosettaStone grave markers.
The palm-sized tablets can be mounted to existing headstones or installed on new ones. Each is engraved with custom symbols representing the deceased's life -- an Rx for a pharmacist, for example, or a sheriff's star for a police officer -- and contains a Near Field Communications radio-frequency identification tag, which allows biographical data to be loaded onto any NFC-enabled phone with the wave of a hand (NFC is expected to be standard on mobile phones in North America by 2012).
A unique web ID is also engraved so people without NFC can raise the dead -- or at least their personal histories -- on any computer.
As early as 2015, seniors will outnumber children for the first time in Canadian history, while the number of centenarians is projected to at least triple by 2036. For end-trepreneurs, this represents a killer opportunity.
"The mainstream corporate chains aggressively sell pre-needs on the premise that it takes the worry away from your family but, really, it's a hedge against your family taking a cheap way out," says Tom Jokinen, author of Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training.
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