Arizona company Objecs announced today that it has developed "enhanced memorial products" that add Near Field Communications tags to cemetery markers, which allow text and photos to be "embedded" in a headstone and retrieved whenever a cell phone is touched against its surface.
It's the same inductive coupling technology used in wallet phones that allows complex information sharing at the expense of practically no electrical energy.
Objecs, which specializes in "object hyperlinking," or assigning a Web-based presence to real world objects, sells two products. One is called RosettaStone, which is a palm-sized stone tablet; the other is Data Tag, which adheres directly to headstones. In good outdoor conditions, the company says the Personal RosettaStone should be readable for as much as 300 years.
While it does conjure up fantastical images of Jor-el's parting messages to Superman, this sort of tagging can actually be incorporated into the extremely popular (and lucrative) genealogy business.
"Each tag has a unique ID number that serves the same purpose as a database primary key," John Bottorff, Objecs Founder said in a statement today. "This unique ID number creates a common reference between the physical world and the digital world in ways that first and last name by itself can not."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
