User Centered

After posting this article on Legacy Locker, CNN reporter Mallory Simon contacted to follow up on my likes & concerns with the service. You can read more in the article...

New Services Promise Life After Death

Eddie Lopez is the kind of tech-savvy guy for which a service such as Legacy Locker was made. The St. Paul, Minnesota, man has three online banking accounts, a PayPal account, domain names, Web-hosting accounts, multiple e-mail addresses and many social-networking accounts.

"I do think this is something people should be really considering these days," Lopez told CNN when asked about services such as Legacy Locker. He wants to hire a service to handle his digital assets but is concerned about privacy.

"Although I'm glad there's people breaking ground in this area, I don't think I would jump at the first opportunity to sign up," Lopez said. "My concerns are turning over such an exhaustive list of user names and passwords to a single business. That's one-stop shopping for any hacker to get access to just about every detail of my life."

Lopez would prefer to entrust half of his digital-security information to a service such as Legacy Locker and the other half to family members, so that each side's information would be useless without the other's.

"I hope Legacy Locker and similar services can address these privacy-security concerns with some real-world solutions," he said. "I just don't feel comfortable turning over my digital life -- built over 15 years -- to a kind promise."

Personal Area Networks have been touted for years (mostly around the Bluetooth crowds)as a way to converge our devices together by communicating, rather than having one single device serve multiple uses. Here's another step in that direction- a portable wifi hotspot that differs conceptually, but not technically, from all the other forms of cellular based internet access devices.

The MiFi from verizon (David Pogue review) is, in theory something you could just casually place in your backpocket and have a wireless network bubbled around you. I say this is different from cell phone tethering or dedicated cellular connections that connect to devices via USB, because this has the "hands off" Ron Popeil "set it and forget it" approach that I like. It's really the same solution we've seen for years, but this time presented in a different way.

There's a certain je ne sais quois to have this thing just always on despite whether your laptop or phone or desktop is turned on and connected. I suppose I could be convinced that it should/will become the next generation of tethering from a cellphone (assuming it could be set to be independently/always on, and that a battery can handle that usage) but for now I applaud the user centered approach.