Well, many of you are blackberry fanatics (or iPhone, etc.), thought I would be a little different and show something that is "outside of the box" thinking (you will understand the pun of the quotation shortly).
Found this on the Inc.com blog
It looks like Verizon is going to have to revamp its popular, "Can you hear me now?" ad campaign. We've grown accustomed to the ubiquitous signal-strength tester crawling the nooks and crannies of our urban and rural landscape asking what has truly become the question of our age. His job is about to get a lot tougher.
According to the Mainichi Daily News, Ishinokoe, a gravestone manufacturer in Mainichi, Japan, is installing a QR code inside grave markers that can be accessed by cell phone. The feature can be added to existing gravestones for 200,000 yen. Those visiting the gravesite are able to access images, photos, and video of the departed. According to the company president, they can also, "view a greeting from the chief mourner at the funeral and browse through the guest book." In the spirit of true interactivity, they will have the option of adding their own personal entries via cell phone.
Is it me, or has this company just recalibrated the requisite lengths I must now go in order to create a little distance between myself and the crackberry jungle? From this day forward, I can no longer anticipate escaping the crushing demands of the inbox even in the great beyond. I guess the definition of perpetual care will have to be expanded to include unlimited voice, text, and Web browsing.
P.S. All kidding aside, I think this idea is going to be huge. I predict that within a few years we will barely remember grave markers that did not visually memorialize a person's life and provide visitors the opportunity to add to a perpetually growing tribute. The main concern will be how to secure the site from digital vandals. In the end the security challenge will probably just provide an additional service revenue stream for site maintenance. And the beat goes on.
Now, as you go through your work, are their interesting repurposing ideas that might be a new business? Think about it. I have said this over and over again. Continuous improvement is fine, but if you want to be successfuly and the market leader, you must have continual innovation! This is key.
3 comments:
So, do you include a GPS tracker for those people that only visit the cemetary annually or even less? Are we about to lose the ability to be "out of touch" all together? Talk about Big Brother!
I saw a recent news documentary about how often a picture is taken . . . it is alot .. . every store you go in, many stop lights, many streets, parking places, you have street view now with google . . . big brother is already here . . . just 24 years later than George anticipated
Thanks for the comments. There were two purposes of my post what I found interesting in the article: (1) looks like you will never get away even in death, and (2) an example of applying a technology to a completely different purpose and forming a new business.
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