Fall River tech startup Echodify builds time capsules for your digital life. Check it out.

FALL RIVER — When their mother Joyce died in 2016, Kevin and Lisa Desforges lost more than a parent.

"She had a website with historical and political writings, and she had a blog," said Lisa. “All her photos and videos on her phone — we lost everything. That’s the stuff I’d kill to have back.”

The two have begun collaborating on a tech startup called Echodify, a web-based app that essentially acts like a time capsule. People can use it to store all their most important digital files and set it to be bequeathed to anyone you choose, automatically, up to 50 years from now.

“The concept is to fill a void in the lives of people that want to preserve and hopefully pass on a digital legacy," Kevin said.

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How Echodify was developed: A love of the past

Echodify’s founder, Kevin, has a background in data science, but the concept for the app came from a far less clinical place.

“This is born out of a passion of mine for researching genealogy,” he said.

Since he was a teen, he’s been interested in tracing his family tree. He eventually developed a website to help genealogists called Visual Ancestor, an online library of 19th early 20th century photographs, categorized by place — and face.

“It’s not only the digitization of really cool Victorian photographs — it’s inputting the data into a searchable database and hooking up the photography to facial recognition," he said.

While working on that project, he said, he met a distant, elderly cousin who was upset that nobody she knew was interested in her family history and the research she’d compiled. She had no one to leave it to.

“That stuck with me,” he said. “I decided to generalize the concept of the Visual Ancestor project ... to provide a general solution to people to package up their most meaningful digital items.”

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What Echodify does: A digital time capsule

With Echodify, users can create a “Virtual Legacy.” It’s like an online safe-deposit box where they can store documents, digital images, audio and video files — digital files of any kind. They’re kept safe behind double encryption. Then, you can set it to be automatically given to someone else in the future.

Unlike changing a will, changing who your Virtual Legacy goes to is as simple as a few clicks. Or, if you don’t want to leave it to anyone, that’s also an option. You can also set a Virtual Legacy to be released into the public domain.

“It's versatile,” he said. “You can group-collaborate with people. You can have your entire family working on this digital legacy. And then you can pass it on if you want.”

There are plenty of places to store files online, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud among them. One disadvantage of those, Kevin and Lisa said, is that they charge subscription fees. If you don’t keep up the subscription, your data disappears forever.

Echodify, on the other hand, charges a one-time fee based on how much space you want and how long you want it stored for. To keep 250 megabytes of space secure and pass it on in 15 years, Echodify charges $45. A gigabyte of space protected for 45 years is $114. There are other combinations of storage and time, from 100 megabytes up to 25 gigabytes and 10 to 50 years. There are no recurring fees.

The app also lets users send Echoes, which Kevin said can “message the future,” scheduling a text message to anyone up to a century from now. They’re working on a product called Shouts, digital greeting cards you can send to loved ones up to 50 years from now.

Thinking ahead about uses for Echodify

Sitting in their office at 90 Pond St., in what was once the carriage house of the American Printing Co. mill, Kevin and Lisa are thinking far into the future.

“People hear the concept and they run with it,” Lisa said.

She said she envisions clients being able to use Echodify to store life documents — kids in foster care or the homeless having a place to safely store digital copies of all their personal records like birth certificates and school records, accessible online at all times, not tied to a physical address. She can see families using it to collaborate and share videos of each other. Artists could use it to keep their work in one place and then publish it all.

“A friend of mine in L.A. said ‘What if I have a vault and I upload all my writings and release it to the public domain in 50 years?’” she said.

Lisa said the days are coming when more and more of people’s lives will be stored digitally, and people will need a simple way to pass on these things to others so entire lives don’t get lost in the cloud.

"Let’s preserve the humanness to this," she said. "This is technology but it’s leveraging it in a way that keeps that heartfelt connection going.”

Dan Medeiros can be reached at dmedeiros@heraldnews.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News today.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Tech startup Echodify sells 'virtual legacies'; stores digital life