QR Codes Turn Headstones into Interactive Memorials - Living Headstone™

QR Codes Turn Headstones into Interactive Memorials - Living Headstone™

a TAG for a headstone...?.

A QR code for a headstone...now thats an interesting idea?....what about an ihopto TAG with the name as well. That would make it unique! :-)

QR Code On The Tombstone, The Combination Of Technology And History

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Jayce

Wave a smartphone over the bench-style headstone of Edouard Garneau at Holyrood Cemetery in Shoreline and you’ll learn he was a collision-repair specialist and successful businessman who loved to barbecue, fly his airplane and travel.
You’ll see pictures of Garneau and the life he shared with his wife, Faye, and of him with his airplane and riding on an elephant.
“They’ll learn he was a genuinely nice guy and what he did with his life, what made him successful,” said Faye Garneau. “It’s for the family, for generations to come.”
This is all thanks to a QR — quick-response — code affixed to Garneau’s grave. It’s a tiny square code, about the size of a postage stamp, that gives you a link to a password-protected website that has volumes of information about Garneau’s life.
These QR codes are similar to the bar codes found on most products. The digital patterns, when scanned by a smartphone or an iPad with the proper application, connect the user to a website with the person’s written history, photos and videos. The information on the site is provided by the family, and the service is part of the headstone purchase.
The code on Garneau’s headstone was added by Seattle’s Quiring Monuments, which began offering what it calls “living headstones” several months ago and has sold about three dozen so far.
Last month, it put QR codes on the headstones of six Medal of Honor recipients and two Silver Star recipients at Seattle’s Evergreen Washelli Cemetery.
“What it means to me, it opens up the world to virtually anyone who is in our cemetery,” said Washelli general manager Scott Sheehan. “Before, you might stand on a gravesite and read [the tombstone] and wonder what that person was about. Now you can read their life story. Every life has a story. That’s our tagline.”
Dave Quiring, 68, president of the third-generation company, has affixed QR codes to the gravestones of his parents. When his father died, he said, the family found a scrap of paper in his wallet, the often quoted line from the Robert Frost poem: The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
That is now on his father’s QR code and it gives Quiring peace when he reads it.
“For many funerals, there are few young people,” Quiring said. “This technology brings them back into the fold. This marriage of technology with history seems a way to make preserving memories more important to people.”
At first, Quiring considered not just affixing the QR code but carving it into the headstone, but he didn’t want it so permanent. Not only can the codes be placed on tombstones, but also to mausoleums, a bench in the garden, a sundial and even a cremation urn.
Those who have passwords can go to the website for the person who has died and add even more information, including pictures and videos.
If you want to put a QR code on an existing headstone, it costs $65, Quiring said.
Sheehan, with Evergreen Washelli, sees the service expanding. The cemetery offers arborists tours of its trees; maybe a QR code could be affixed to a Washington elm giving a history of the tree. He sees it as an important part of a self-guided tour of the cemetery, perhaps affixing the codes to the historical monuments in the cemetery.
As for Quiring, he’s already planning to use a QR code on his own grave marker. The site would have to include video of his beloved 1967 Austin Healey and the 57-pound king salmon he caught in Alaska.

via Seattle Times

Graffiti TAGs

We see our TAGs being an individual signature - like a graffiti TAG.. a way of tagging the internet. We want to develop our TAG to being an online signature that can be customised and used for logging onto blogs or on social media sites.
We want to be the online register of internet signatures..
We will be developing functionality that will allow users to personalise their TAG image...





Graffiti Creator
An interesting article on the purpose and history of Graffiti Tagging
An article on Graffiti TAGs

Get hopping with our new URL shortener....

We have been added to the list of global URL shortener providers ...
See a list of some of the others..

http://ih.to/4x

Ours can be used in conjunction with our QR Code generator..

Very useful when tweeting.. book mark the page now..
All you do is enter your long URL and you will get the corresponding smaller URL that you can use to send out..

try it my fellow ihoppers!..

http://ih.to/

image courtesy of http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

Where will online scanning technology go?...

We are all seeing the 2d QR barcodes appearing ..but where will these involve.?. This article in adweek looks at some new start ups in the UK - Aurasma and Blippar - 2 new image-scanning and augmented reality application providers. They move away from barcodes and instead use brand images scanned by the phone to trigger content to the user.
http://shar.es/bXZfR

One of the benefits of ihopto TAG (if used by itself) is that it is simpler and not reliant on a QR reader. It can be used in conjunction with whatever new technology evolves. A user can still remember the brand words, or slogan and use them to enter into our ihopto site or facebook application, or wherever an ihopto search can be made.
One of our ideas is to provide a reader for an ihopto TAG - that would allow the TAG to be read and trigger the online web pages.Wherever a user saw our blue ihopto they could use our scanner to read the words in the TAG. An easier item to scan than a QR code.
We decided initially to combine it with a QR code so people could use the existing readers to start with.

Was this the betamax for the QR /2d barcode world?.

Interesting wikipedia article - ..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

Interesting that this was a solution before the problem was known. An invention to get users from printed media to online that was seen as one of the worst inventions!. Seems silly now with the rise of QR codes. I guess the solution re the barcodes was correct. The issue was the reader which was solved by the smartphone..something we can thank Steve Jobs for..?. Without Steve Jobs and the rise of the smartphone would QR codes be as popular today?.

What is your online identity?.

An interesting article on the use of your real name with Google +. http://ih.to/4p
This opens up the question on what is your identity online.
This is how we saw ihopto TAGs being used - a way of creating your own  identity - a bit like a Graffiti TAG.


Handles, pseudonyms, usernames all have allowed us to have a unique "identity". We use the internet for different purposes at times. For our professional network we want to present our professional online world - e.g Linked in, and perhaps our company website. For family we might want to present our "activity" online world - links what are we doing everyday- e.g facebook, photo websites.While with friends we might want to share our "personal" online world that might link to sites we don't want our family or professional contacts to know about. We saw people having muliple TAGs to allow different online identities. What different identities do you have and what TAGs would you take?..