When a loved one dies, all that remains are memories. Turning memories into something that’s digitally sharable is the app Lalo, which has launched out of closed beta on the App Store and Google Play. The idea is to store digital memories of loved ones, which is not very effective with something like Facebook groups.
Though a part of what’s frightfully called ‘death tech’ industry, Lalo is from a Seattle-based start-up with its founder being Juan Medina, who spent eight years as a senior manager at Amazon before calling it a day in March 2021. Medina’s look at the end-of-life space stems from his experience of losing his father at a young age. Now his nine-year-old daughter asks him about her grandfather and about South America where he comes from.
Lalo is named after Medina’s father’s nickname and works as sort of a scrapbook. Once you sign up, there is a space you create where memories get shared. Of course, memories of a lost family member reside among relatives and friends. You can invite them to join the space and collaborate, uploading videos, text and voice. At the moment everything is free on Lalo but according to TechCrunch, Lalo plans to charge around $25 a year in the future for access to more storage space. But Medina has also added that there will always be a free version and he won’t sell ads on the app nor will he sell user data. “I’m not here to profit off of people’s loss, and there’s certain things that we’re not going to do. That’s been a challenge with some investors,” Medina told TechCrunch.
During the closed beta there were around 600 users during which Medina noticed that voice messages were popular as a method of storytelling. Helping to make the app standout are prompts — like narrating the story of how grandparents met or recipes — that have been developed with guidance from Dr. Robert Niemeyer, a psychology professor at the University of Memphis, an expert on grief.
Besides Lalo, there are other options, like Memories.com and HereAfter AI. But Lalo seems to have a more user-friendly approach to the grim topic.
