National Obituary Archive(NOA)

12/1/2000

Jonesboro, Arkansas

Continental Computer Corporation, the funeral industry’s largest software manufacturer, announced the launch of Arrangeonline.com, a Web site to publish millions of current and archival obituaries, serve friends and relatives of bereaved families and help funeral homes benefit from the Web.

The company already has raised nearly $9 million from private investors I a quiet money-raising effort that preceded the launch. Continental President Michael Fullington said Arrangeonline.com would be the best-financed site of its kind at launch time and will have access to more obituaries in the short term than any of the various competitors that have entered this potentially lucrative market.

Arrangeonline.com was introduced in Baltimore, Maryland, at the opening of the annual convention of the National Funeral Directors Association. Despite a flurry of online startups in the death-care industry in the past year, Continental’s site is the first backed by an established technology company with years of experience in the funeral industry. The 16-year-old company’s best-selling product, The Director’s Assistant for Windows, already is in use in about 5,000 funeral homes nationwide and controls 80 percent of its market niche.

“Funeral directors who use our software can upload every obituary in their files literally with a single mouse click,” Fullington said. “We will have the largest obituary archive in the world in a matter of weeks.” He estimated that between 5 million and 10 million obituaries already reside in The Director’s Assistant databases of individual funeral homes. Funeral directors use the industry-leading software to handle about one million of the 2.4 million deaths in the United States each year.

Obituaries are among the best-read items in newspapers and are sought by millions of Web visitors who want information about the deaths of far-off friends and relatives or who wish to build family trees or conduct genealogical research. Arrangeonline.com will offer visitors to its site not only information about recent deaths but the opportunity to send flowers to the service and condolences to the family, as well as to post their own memorial tributes on the site. Other information available on the site includes maps and directions to funeral homes and cemeteries, a directory of the nation’s 22,000 funeral homes and guidance for planning a funeral.

The company expects one of the most popular features of the site to be the “Obituary Alert,” which enables visitors to register to be notified by e-mail whenever the obituary of someone from their hometown, school, organization or military unit is posted on the site. Although using The Director’s Assistant software makes posting of obituaries a single-click exercise, the site will be open to all funeral homes, and funeral directors may use special, easy-to-complete Web forms to send information directly to Arrangeonline.com.

Arrangeonline.com was the brainchild of Layng Guerriero, a Houston businessman who, with his business partner William Kilroy, Jr., approached Continental Computer about ways to make funeral services easier and smoother for bereaved families. They have since become investors in the project and have been active in shaping the new venture.

Arrangeonline.com is a subsidiary of Continental Computer Corp., a privately-held corporation based in Jonesboro. The company has been providing high-quality management software to the funeral industry since 1985. Software Magazine has consistently ranked Continental one of the top 500 software companies in the world.