SUAMICO, WI (WTAQ) – A company specializing in personal digital content storage is expanding its Suamico operation.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Forever, Inc., announced Tuesday that their retail location at 2530 Lineville Road will be their new North American Media Conversion and Processing facility.
“Basically in the front of the store, you can get information, you can bring your stuff for digitization, and you can go to classes,” said Forever Founder/CEO Glen Meakem. “In the back of the store, that’s the place where we do all this digital conversion, we’re receiving FedEx boxes and digitizing all that, then posting it to people’s Forever accounts before we ship it back to them.”
The move comes just five months after Forever opened this retail store and acquired the assets of Life Highlights Digital Media – a Wisconsin based company that specialized in digitizing and organizing old photos and videos for families.
“The skills and work ethic of our Forever Green Bay team are exceptional and mirror the ethos of the entire Forever team. I’m thrilled with the tremendous growth we are experiencing as a company in general, and the progress we are making with our digital conversion services in particular,” said Meakem. “Our Green Bay facility is making great contributions towards our ability to help people easily and securely digitize, organize, and save their memories for generations.”
Meakem says last year they had about 30,000 paying customers, this year they’ll be over 80,000 and he expects next year to top 200,000.
GENEALOGISTS SIGNING UP
In addition to the announcement of their expansion in Suamico, Meakem also said that the Green Bay and De Pere Antiquarian Society is teaming up with the company.
Forever will digitally convert some of the Society’s most valuable works, and permanently store them online.
“As people research and find really important artifacts and information, where are they going to keep it to share it with different generations?” said Meakem. “The only place is Forever. They’ve got incredible artifacts on their Forever site already. Fabulous paintings and a digital image of a photo they own that shows both Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad in 1864. So it’s a very important and emotional photo that they own.”
Meakem explains that Forever has a unique and complete memory keeping solution, which includes digital conversion, permanent shareable storage, organizational tools, desk top software, mobile apps, sharing capability, print capability, and a patent-pending guarantee.
SECURING PRIVATE MEMORIES
With the expected bump in business, both involving historical societies and families, how can all these precious, private photos and documents get protected from the growing cyber security threat?
“The modern encryption really works, the U.S. government can’t get into that iPhone (belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters) because of encryption,” Meakem says. “We have encryption, we’re triple backed-up. We guarantee we will not lose people’s material, it’s the absolute heart of our business. Preserving our customers’ digital content for a very, very long time.”
Forever guarantees customers who buy “permanent sharable storage” that their photos and memories will be saved for their lifetimes plus 100 years with the goal of many generations beyond.
The company can make this guarantee because a large portion of the money customers pay for “permanent storage” is deposited into the Forever Guarantee Fund, a restricted fund that acts like a permanent endowment or reserve, with earnings paying for storage, bandwidth, and migration to new file formats for generations into the future.
