Something You Meant to Say? Don’t Let Death Stop You.

The pharaohs once built massive tombs to telegraph their wealth and power to future generations.

A Twin Cities company is now offering a more cost effective alternative, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune: a gravestone-embedded QR code that takes smartphone wielding cemetery walkers to a website with information about the grave dweller such as pictures, video, an obituary and genealogical information.

“It's a chance for future generations to make a connection with a loved one,” Norm Taple, president of Katzman Monument Co., which launched the gravestone QR codes business in 2011, told the Strib. “There's no emotional connection when all you can look at is a headstone, probably a dirty headstone, at that. We've got people telling their own stories, speaking directly to future generations.”

The idea for the company grew out of the newly popular industry of memorial videos, messages people record to be played at their funerals, Taple said.