OKC web venture offers retrieval of lost loved one's login

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City),  Apr 10, 2008  by Marie Price

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Local physician and self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur Brian Stanton has come up with a way for people to give their heirs immediate, private access to wills, account passwords and other critical information after they die.

Stanton's new Internet start-up, iGoodbye.com, provides a secure site to store such documents until they're needed.

"Like all my ideas, I was looking for it for myself," said anesthesiologist Stanton.

He said he couldn't find what he was searching for and decided to do it himself.

Industrial engineer Tanya Sokolsky is Stanton's partner in the venture.

Stanton said that in this day of user names and passwords, many people may not want to disclose those publicly.

"However, if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, you'd probably want your wife to have that information, or your children," he said.

Heirs would be required to supply a death certificate to access a client's account.

Cost for the service is $29.99 per year. Clients can also receive the service free, but their heirs must pay $100 for each year the account has been active to access the information.

Heirs of a client with a free account may never need to use it, Stanton said, because in many cases there is sufficient warning of a person's impending demise that they have time to get their estate in order.

Stanton describes iGoodbye.com as a kind of sudden-death insurance policy for information.

He said there may be additional fees if iGoodbye.com must search for heirs or perform other extra services such as translation of foreign documents.

He envisions that the service would be used by the average person, probably not by wealthy individuals with teams of attorneys.

"You don't have to be horribly rich these days to have some kind of a kingdom," Stanton said.

There could be other types of information people want to keep confidential, he said, even a special family recipe.

"People are using their heads as repositories of critical information," Stanton said.

Why not a traditional safe deposit box or trusted attorney?

"If you get hit by a bus, they seal your box," Stanton said. "You don't really have access to that. In fact, a lot of people will rummage through the box before your family does."

Families also get scattered across the nation, or even the world, he said.

"The Internet is everywhere," Stanton said.

The site costs much less than an attorney's services, and lawyers are not set up to provide the breadth of services contemplated for iGoodbye.com, Stanton said.

"Attorneys are local," he added. "They would have to get to the attorney in the sudden event of your death."

Stanton said iGoodbye.com could also serve as a place for investigative journalists to deposit information securely, to be disseminated in the event of their death.

"There's just no telling what people might use something like this for," he said. "There are a lot of people and there are a lot of different stories."

Stanton said clients may encrypt their documents themselves with free or paid programs, or have iGoodbye.com do it for them.

Stanton has also launched languagemed.com, a site that supplies medical forms, patient histories and other documents in several languages, and antiquearts.com, where antique sellers display their items online. The latter has since been sold to another company and has done very well, Stanton said.

"We've tried several projects," he said. "Some have been more successful than others."

His web development firm, Bontemp, Inc., has been in business since about 1995.

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