the100yearwebsite - Time capsules
Richard Brooks had his epiphany atop a mountain in Chang Mai, Thailand, while convalescing after a serious car accident and the recent death of a close friend.
“I realised how precious my own memories were and thought, wouldn’t it be fantastic to give people the ability to store their memories online, year after year,” he says.
That was New Year’s Day 2007, but such was his enthusiasm for the idea that Brooks had raised £50,000 of startup capital and formed the company by April, with the100yearwebsite going live in September of the same year.
Having a background in the IT and telecoms industry, Brooks was acutely aware of the problems that ever-changing technologies can pose to those wishing to retain information in a useable format.
“As technology advances at an ever-increasing rate, today’s BlackBerry may be next year’s eight-track tape and its precious contents can become unreadable, inaccessable or lost to newer devices,” Brooks says.
The100yearwebsite provides clients with a digital capsule into which they can load pictures, music and video in the present format, safe in the knowledge that as technology moves on, the contents of their capsule is automatically upgraded to always remain readable. The client can also choose when his or her capsule is opened and who can access the contents.
The100yearwebsite may have been taken to market at express speed, but the site has already reached break even point, with more than 2,000 people having bought a capsule in its first six months of trading.
“By far the biggest challenge is marketing. Beware the person who tells you that they are going to get 10,000 people to your site,” Brooks cautions.