Respectance.com

I recently took a trip out to Krakow, Poland, and meet the rest of the team behind Respectance. These are the guys and gals that design, build, and test our site. They are an amazing hard working team, and their talents are incredible.

The weather was slightly different from the sunny San Francisco sky that I am so fond of. I walked to the office each day through snow, sleet, slush, or some strange combination of all three. The temperature was always about 0’ C, but everything out there just felt so much more fresh and clean…

Not only was the air fresh and clean, but so were the new ideas, layouts, and features that were being built. I saw the preview of Respectance version 2 for the first time, and I was absolutely blown away! It’s near completion, and there are a whole lot of new features that I know everyone will enjoy. I don’t want to give away the surprises and spoil anything just yet, but I will say that you should keep checking back to ensure that you are one of the first to create a new Tribute. It will amaze everyone you show it to, and your loved ones will be remembered on a whole new level.

Continue to check back for more updates!

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Anna Nicole Smith has been through a lot, and we pray that her daughter DannielLynn doesn’t have to through what her mom did. Media has always been swirling around Anna Nicole Smith controversies. Her career took off as a Playboy Model for March 1992 issue of Play Boy Magazine. She got more hyped after she got married to J. Howard Marshall, 89-year-old oil tycoon then followed by inheritance court cases.

Media hovered around Anna Nicole when her 20-year- old son, Daniel Smith, died of lethal combination of drugs in Anna Nicole’s hospital room on September 28, 2006. Five months later, on February 8, 2007, Anna Nicole Smith was pronounced dead of accidental drug overdose. And she did get a presidential kind of media frenzy during her memorial service.

Families have been cashing on Anna Nicole and Daniel Smith’s death. What does this mean for baby Danniellynn, and where does her future lie? We can only pray that’s she gets in a safe hand, and not be hustled for “money”.

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It is good to see, that even though Respectance has been around since July 2007, with half a year of preparation time before that, we already have some good friends. One of our biggest promoters is the Martha Mihaly. She was the first friend of many of our first users. Today she wrote a story about working at Respectance. It is worth reading it.

From her blog:
“Through honest and frank web evangelism I brought our first thousands of members on board. It was not easy, death and grieving is a taboo subject, to reach out and convince people to share their visceral feelings in order to produce (for our purposes) genuine high value content. Market research was extensive, design and feel of the site crucial to attracting the target demographic (women 25-50), and of course writing things that people are interested in hearing about in a concise and easy manner.”

Martha has not been working for Respectance since a couple of months. It is great to receive news from an old friend. Share your memories, Martha!

read the full story here.

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When I read our Respectance blog, it sometimes seems like we are only talking about celebrities. On the contrary, we honestly are often much more touched by private Tributes that relatives and friends setup. It is a combination of sadness and gratitude that we feel.

It is like we are looking at somebody’s life. It feels like you cross a line, for seeing such intimate information. Consequently, it is exactly what the contributors want. The sharing of their memories about this person, makes us feel connected. The idea that the remembered person is still out there, in our hearts, but now also online, feels comforting.

I’d like to draw your attention to a beautiful Tribute for Jedi Franz Pocky. She was a charismatic young lady, that always seemed to ask for one more song at the end of the evening. Pocky had a lot of friends. A lot of them came to contribute to her Tribute. Her going left many wondering what was going on. It is sweet to know that she had so many friends who cared for her. Pocky, it is great to get to know you.

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Together with Mansha Thapa I went to the Fast Company talk in San Francisco last night. It was an interesting mix of people we found at the Mezzanine venue. The discussion that kicked off the evening was about stagflation or recession. The fear is that stagflation will paralyze the economy in the US. I think secretively the US has been stagflating ever since the 70’s.

After the program we got to talk to all the presenters and the rest of the audience. As I said, it was a mixed crowd. On the couch sitting next to us, we found this charming lady. Her name is Susan Bryan and it was the coolest wiz-dame I ever met. Susan had been programming computer database since the sixties in California. Her exact job description at the California Department of Labor: Division of Statistics and Research was “Computer Code Clerk”. Nowadays she runs the Virtual Community for Women on a shoestring budget.

She claims that her generation is not at all understood and is put in a corner where they do not belong. It seems not to hurt her at all. She adds with a big smile: “They refer to us a digital illiterates, and it scares some of those around me”. People in her generation who have studied and had huge careers during their lives, now are being put in the pigeon hole of “illiterate”. That is quite an insult for WEPpies. (Well Educated Pensioners, coined by ourselves ;-).

On the contrary, her community members are very active on the internet and know very well how to master a computer. She explained her favorite cartoon: one dog says to the other, nobody on the internet knows you’re a dog. That was enough barking for us to get her point. By the way, Susan said she loved the idea of Respectance. Good to know we have a new friend.

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