RestingSpot, a location sharing application available in the App Store and Android Market, allows users to mark and share memorial sites of loved ones. Screenshot from the itunes.apple.com.
Last November, Brett Atlas spent 45 minutes driving around a Chicago cemetery in search of his grandfather’s resting spot before he sent this text: “there should be an app for this.”
Within moments after Atlas hit send, Scott Kroeger responded, and upon Atlas’ return to Omaha, the pair co-founded RestingSpot, a service that seeks to identify and guide users to the precise GPS location for every memorial site in cemeteries around the world.
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(Far left, Atlas, photo from facebook.com, and near left, Kroger, photo from twitter.com)
“The subject of death is a difficult part of the human experience,” Atlas said in an interview on Tuesday. “But, ultimately we believe the memory of a person’s life should be honored and celebrated.”
RestingSpot, which as of last week can be found for free in the App Store and soon will be released in the Android market, seeks to build a community around the service of marking these cherished locations, but more importantly, sharing in the memory of the individual.
“We’re not just allowing people to find RestingSpots, which in and of itself is a valuable asset,” Atlas said. “We are building a platform based on those RestingSpots. We are automatically linking those spots to online profiles which can be shared and enjoyed by friends and family for future generations.”
On RestingSpot’s website, users can add a bio along with photo and videos and more information about the loved one that has passed. Screenshot from restingspot.com.
When a location is added to the RestingSpot website, users can bring life to the individual in that person’s online profile by sharing memories, posting photos and videos, leaving messages and connecting family or friends to the loved one. These profiles also honor the character of each individual through biography and personality pages where users can incorporate anything from professional history to personal interests in their memory.
“There are few things we’ve seen that will live on well past our lifetimes,” Atlas said. “Scott and I are both big on creating a legacy for and within our children, so the opportunity to give people the tools to keep the memories of their loved ones alive forever in this type of format has real meaning to us.”
The team said they anticipate the first wave of users to be those connected to the genealogy community, religious organizations, and mortuaries and will soon transition to users who make a more “personal” investment in the service by sharing and memorializing individuals in addition to marking locations.
The RestingSpot app with its core services of marking and searching will be free indefinitely. And though Kroeger said revenue is not a focus of RestingSpot, there are opportunities to connect with services that will add value to its users. In the future, Kroeger said, businesses like florists could use the app to deliver flowers to a particular RestingSpot using the app, as well as share a picture of the bouquet on the RestingSpot profile.
Though the pair said the product is not completely ready, they launched their working product to begin building the RestingSpot community as to engage and adapt to serve the user.
Though the pair continue to work on the evolving project, both Kroeger and Atlas said they have built the site and apps with their audience in mind and maintain respect for their users and their loved ones through their cognizant choices from imagery to colors to language. Talent with Omaha connections helped created the service, Kroeger said, utilizing the help of Omahan Wendy Townley and former Omahan Erin Standley, who assisted in copy editing and design, respectively. “We have serious talent in the area and we wanted to use our community where possible,” Kroger said.
Though RestingSpot is founded in Omaha and the service is entering international scope with work in the United Kingdom and Portugal, RestingSpot continues to prioritize and connect with cemeteries across the United States to reach their goal of marking the exact location of every RestingSpot by Memorial Day 2013.
