Planned Departure – Leave memories … not a mess

Planned Departure is all about planning well in life so that you leave memories and not a mess!

It is about starting the conversation and answering some important questions such as:

• Is your life plan ready?
• How do you want to plan for your family?
• Offer the best education?
• Or gift them happiness?
• Or hope things will eventually fall in place?
• Have you taken any financial advice?
• Do you have life insurance or critical illness cover?
• Or Do you have a Will in place?
• Have you started the important conversation?
• Such as where all your documents are?
• Or shared your secret recipe?
• Does your family know your assets and investments?
• Or your liabilities!
• Are they aware of important online accounts?
• Can your family find everything they need?
• Even when you are not around?
• Will you leave them CHAOS ? Or Mess?
• Or Will you leave them memories?
• Have you planned for everything? or anything?

Now you can!!

With Planned Departure,

• Organise scattered information in one place.
• Leave clear instructions.
• Put everything in order.
• Ensure everything is there even when you are not.

We can help you avoid the mess

So that you can focus on creating memories.
Planned Departure – Leave memories… not a mess!

Sign up now and start planning.

Why your Skype credits could be lost – Forever!

Recently Facebook released its legacy contact feature in the UK. This is a welcome move by Facebook and highlights the importance of ‘digital legacy’.

However, our digital life and digital footprint goes beyond Facebook and Google. We have pointed out the enormous difficulties loved ones can face trying to unravel their deceased’s digital property. 

While Louise Palmer’s story is still fresh in our minds, story of Susan Rowan is surfacing digital legacy problems with another internet giant – Skype.

Susan tried to sort out her husband’s financial affairs after he died of cancer in January. She tried to close his online accounts but was faced with a long painful process of dealing with customer support centres of the online services.

Her experience with Skype left her feeling distressed. To begin with, it was difficult for Susan to contact their customer service over the phone. She had to use web chat and then they refused to refund £25.46 credit to her.

There are many more such cases of family members getting affected by lack of access to digital accounts.

At Planned Departure, our vision is to empower individual to take control of digital life and digital legacy.

The media coverages and now solution from Facebook are helpful in promoting the cause of digital legacy. The UK Law Society has advised people to leave a digital legacy after death, and an increasing number of lawyers are becoming vocal on the same issue.

There is still a long way to go and we need your support!

Please join Planned Departure or contact us for offering digital legacy solution to your clients.

Children and the internet – What you didn’t know

The internet plays a major role in our lives on a day to day basis and that of our children without us realizing how long they spend online each day.

Whilst this might in itself not be a bad thing, the jury is still out on weighing the pros and cons. Key really is for parents to take responsibility of their children in terms of how they engage online.

Here are some facts and figures to show the visual seriousness of this online addiction.

To Tweet or not to Tweet and life without Facebook

No one would deny that social media has created the biggest social shift since the industrial revolution. The two biggest game-changers to date have been Facebook and Twitter both of which started life in slightly different versions to their now well-known platforms.

Facebook, which was launched in February 2004 and developed by 23 year old Mark Zuckerberg, was not a totally original concept. Prior to Facebook there was Facesmash which was started in 2000, and centred on the concept of a game based on pictures. The way it worked was simple. Compare two students’ pictures side by side and pick who was hot or not. A bit shallow but a trend many recent apps still adhere to, think tinder, lovoo and badoo. Facebook came on the scene, and the rest as they say, is history!

According to Statisticbrain the total number of monthly active Facebook users are 1,310,000,000. In 2008 Facebook had 100 million users and as of March 2013 had 1.11 Billion. Facebook filed for a $5 billion IPO on February 1st 2012 and valued the company at $104 billion.

Twitter on the other hand started life as an SMS mobile phone-based platform but over the years it grew into a web platform. It was co-founded by web developer Jack Dorsey and three other founders; Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass. Created in March 2006, it launched in July 2006.

The main ideology behind Twitter was to create a platform of communication for businesses but again as it grew it evolved to something for the general public, businesses and individuals.

It allows users to send and read 140 character messages (tweets) which can include sentences, links to websites, mentions (tagging fellow users) videos, pictures and hashtags.

Registered users can post, favourite and re-tweet tweets but unregistered people can only read them.

According to Statisticbrain, there are a 645,750,000 total number of active registered Twitter users and 9,100 tweets are tweeted every second.

These figures alone clearly demonstrate that both Facebook and Twitter have become important digital assets to those who own accounts. Something which I had not really given much thought to until recently when I accidentally changed my personal profile to a fan page. I instantly thought I had lost everything. Let me elaborate.

I have been a member of Facebook since 2008. I have uploaded pictures, shared and been tagged in various pictures and posts since then. Without realising it Facebook had become an online archive and album for me. Pictures of the birth of my god-children, nephews, nieces, graduation and concerts are all on there. But I never valued them as much as I should till I thought I had lost them for good. Thankfully Facebook support team came to my rescue and restored the page from a fan page to a profile again and that is when I realised, how in the blink of an eye all those memories could have vanished. I had not stored them on an online drive or a drive at home because in my head I thought my Facebook account would always be there.

It certainly made me realise the value of properly storing all these memories.
Most of online storage facilities are free such as Dropbox and iCloud. Depending on the space or bytes you require, you might decide to buy more space on these drives.

All your relevant information regarding your Facebook; passwords, security questions and your pictures can all be saved in your E-vault. It also serves as a backup system for relevant information stored. For example, if your computer crashed and your documents are saved on an external drive you wouldn’t panic or if your Facebook account got deleted all those pictures wouldn’t vanish for good.Some of these storage facilities such as Planned Departure go a step further in terms of their clients delegating beneficiaries who can have access to this information in case something happened and you could no longer access or manage your account.

Storing those memories may be something you only think about doing when you have lost them, as Donald Rumsfeld said ‘Think ahead, don’t let day-to-day operations drive out planning.’ If you found this interesting and insightful please share it or leave a comment.

PlannedDeparture is a KillerStartup!!!

Who/What is KillerStartups?

KillerStartups is an online publication and entrepreneur community.

They believe Internet Entrepreneurs are stars and aim to be a valuable destination for startup founders, website owners, and other internet entrepreneurs by empowering them to grow their online businesses through the information, tools, and training they offer.

Why PlannedDeparture is talking about KillerStartups…

A few days ago PlannedDeparture was interviewed on KillerStartups.

It was a good opportunity to explain in depth what PlannedDeparture is all about.

How we started. Why we started. What we hope to achieve and what we have to offer.

KillerStartups help startup companies by providing a platform for us to explain what we do.

“Our digital footprint is growing and becoming important every day. Our digital life has real financial and emotional value associated with it. However, there is no clear and straightforward way to transfer aspects of digital life to the right people after we pass away.”

Read more on KillerStarups.

Digital Legacy is becoming mainstream – Are you protecting yours?

Digital assets have been around for a long time, but it’s good to know that digital legacy is becoming mainstream as well.

Big organisations like Google and Yahoo have realised the need to talk about digital legacy. Yahoo came up with Yahoo ending and Google launched Google Inactivity Account Manager to handle digital legacy of users on their platform. Even Law society urged people to leave clear instructions on what happens to their digital legacy.

We, at Planned Departure firmly believe that digital legacy is part of our assets and it should be protected. It’s good to see that media is realising importance of digital legacy and playing it’s part in raising awareness. Recently, Planned Departure was featured on ‘The Economic Times’ and they highlighted the importance of thinking about digital legacy and importance of products like Planned Departure.

I would recommend you to read this news story and see how important this issue is. They have highlighted the issue of a young Google/Gmail user who had his parents spend months trying to retrieve his about-to-be-published book, after he died. Also a bitcoin miner with currency worth over Rs 5 lakh is wondering how to manage inheritance after he’s dead.

We realised importance of digital legacy a while back and launched Planned Departure to address this growing problem.

“Planned Departure, a UK-based startup helping users manage their digital remains, is seeing increased activity on the ground. The biggest challenge is that many users tend to think of traditional legal heirs while planning digital afterlife. “Our digital assets are so complex that transferring it to legal heirs is not a right way to solve it,” said Komal Joshi, cofounder of Planned Departure.”

We are working hard to ensure that digital legacy becomes mainstream. We are innovating constantly to ensure that it becomes easier for you to manage your digital life and create digital legacy. Please sign-up today and start protecting your digital legacy.

 

Who is influencing your decision?

Over the years i have learnt that with adequate planning and careful decision making everything in life gets easier

But what happens if we fail to plan and get our life and affairs in order?

We often steer our lives in the direction of what happens to us in the future.  Some of us tend to make bad decisions and blame others. Some of us tend to let other people make decisions for us and then we blame ourselves or others when things don’t go the way we want them to.

I personally always make my own decisions based on the notion that if I listen to others and make decisions based on what they say, if things do not go right who should I blame?

Myself for listening or others for influencing me?

None of the above. I listen to the advice, words or statements other people might offer or say but the final decision is always mine. The decision is based on what I feel is right and best for me. That way if it goes well or bad, I know it was all me.

I am solely  responsible for my actions and their outcomes. Just as everyone else is. Life is full of ups and downs. If you constantly give yourself reasons to  fight with your inner self, how will you conquer your battle against society and the world?

As a result i like to try my best in planning and organising everything. From my finances, career, profession, holidays to my digital accounts.

Every little detail counts and that is why i personally have an account with PlannedDeparture for my digital assets. All my social account information and pictures and music are safely stored because i do not want to risk losing any information.

Just as we have measures guarding our physical assets, our digital assets are equally important.

With every step remember PlannedDeparture isn’t just here to help your loved ones in future but to support you by assuring your digital assets are safe and secure.

 

Techhub Demo Night

TechHub is a unique environment where technology startups can start up faster. It  creates an international network for people with similar interests around the world to work, collaborate and learn from each other by running events, advice sessions and many more. This allows startups to develop faster with the right networking and support. It is a very good environment for startups with amazing infrastructure and a lot of help and networks.

On the 5th of August Nam our Marketing executive and one of our founders Anand Ramdeo attended one of the events organised by techhub. ‘Demo night’.Demo Night is a chance to see what other StartUps are working on. These are the top startups which have a major influence on the future of business & tech. It is held once every month and each business has 3 mins to showcase their ideas and explain what they are about.

Why did we attend?

Planned Departure  was part of the startups for this Demo night. Our main aim was to promote Planned Departure and build awareness about Digital Legacy but to also network and get valuable feedback about the platform and what other people think.

A lot of people that attended the event were very interested in Planned Departure and wanted to learn more which was great and we also learnt about other startups and interesting ideas like Resolver and Hitch.

What we experienced…

 

We met many young and innovative people with great and amazing ideas.

The atmosphere itself was inspiring and gave a sense of urgency to create and explore new technologies that would be beneficial to others.

We encountered people from different backgrounds e.g. designers, lawyers, teachers and others all interested in startups and technologies.

We met a fashion designer by day who  builds a social media for freelancers by night.

With modern technology everyone has a chance to build their ideas and make their  dreams a reality.

It was inspiring to see many start-ups and ecosystem around them.  It was also motivating to see that Planned Departure was received well by the audience. We have received great feedback from our users – please sign-up for our free trial and let us know your thoughts about Planned Departure.

 

Automated Thanking Machine…

This video gave me goosebumps.  It was touching and inspiring.

Sometimes in life we have to just say thank you. The word ‘thank you’ itself is a very powerful word on its own. These two words make people feel appreciated and motivated. It gives a sense of assurance and encouragement to go on doing something. By Saying thank you and meaning can change a life.

We at PlannedDeparture want to say a ‘BIG THANK YOU’ to all our subscribers, clients, followers and blog post readers. We appreciate the support. It encourages us to strive to create a bigger and better company for you.

 

Tech TalkFest Event – a must attend …for entrepreneurs

A few weeks back when I got the opportunity to attend one of the breakfast events organised by Tech Talkfest on Digital Policy. I personally benefited from the opportunity and got to speak to a noted guest – Sir Jim Knight who is a Labour Party MP. It also met many interesting people. So when Zoe and Ghilaine organised other events, I thought I would share this information with other entrepreneurs and like minded people so that everyone could benefit. Because, it’s all about networking and helping others :).

In case you are wondering

What is Tech Taklfest?

Tech Talkfest is a distinct, high caliber, trustworthy network of talented people providing business growth and facilitating fortuitous connections. It is a monthly event organised in London- Shoreditch.

Zoe Cunningham, Britain’s Brightest Woman in 2013 is the founder of Tech Talkfest networking events. She is also the main presenter for Tech Talkfest radio and is the managing director of Softwire Technology.

OK got it

When is the next event and more importantly what is it about?

If you are already sold to the concept then why not join them in the next event. It is definitely going to be an experience worth participating in. Journalists, business men, business women, bloggers, researchers, entrepreneurs or passionate technology professionals and electronic developers, put these dates in your calendars, diaries and notepads :).

The next event is;

FoodTech Talkfest Evening Drinks 12th August 2014

Tuesday 12th August 2014

18:30 – 21:30

Adam St Club, 9 Adam St, WC2N 6AA

Food and Technology are both hot topics right now. Join us and special guests from the tech food world to discuss the cross-over between tech and food and find out how tech is affecting the food industry, making it more accessible.

Claim 20% discount and save £4 to buy me a coffee :).

Use the following link to register and claim your 20% discount. In case you are wondering what to do with the £4 you save. Here’s a hint I love coffee ;).

Register at:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/foodtech-talkfest-evening-drinks-tickets-11478308931?discount=Bringaguest

Don’t miss out.