Not exactly new, but still an appropriately macabre afternoon distraction on Dia de los Muertos, Dead.AtYourAge.com — built “a couple of years ago as a lark” by Peter Rinearson’s Seattle startup Intersect PTP — takes your birth date and tells you who you’ve outlived.
After a friend pointed me toward it today, I got to wondering what’s up with Intersect and reached out to Rinearson, the prize-winning journalist turned Microsoft exec and tech entrepreneur.
He tells me in an email his development team “is hard at work on a new service now. Details in a few weeks!”
The company was raising cash earlier this year — up to $4 million, according to this amended SEC Form D.
Intersect came on the scene in 2010 as “a site where storytellers of all kinds can explore what happens when stories are mapped by time and place and shared with the world”. It looked like Facebook’s Timeline, coming about a year later, would trample the startup’s product.
But Rinearson says Intersect is still the place to go “if the living want to tell their own stories about things they’ve done,” posting publicly or privately.
As for Dead At Your Age, it was a practice site for the Intersect team, tapping “a large database we developed of what notable people did at exact, to-the-day ages. In this case, the thing people did at an exact age was die,” he says.
Intersect never promoted it, Rinearson says, but “thousands of people have signed up to get emails that tell them whenever they outlive somebody notable. It’s just for fun.”
While waiting for a response from Rinearson this afternoon, the idea occurred to me for a Dead At Your Age for startups. I’m sure there’s an entrepreneur or two out there who would like to know which companies they’ve outlasted.
