Similar to the way a written will designates what happens to a physical estate and assets, Legacy Locker's service will take care of digital assets, including e-mail, digital photos, and online accounts.

Cofounders Jeremy Toeman and Adam Burg plan to sell directly to consumers and estate planners in April. The service includes a free trial account with three assets, one beneficiary, and one Legacy letter. After the trial, the service costs $29.99 a year or a $299.99 lifetime fee, both of which come with unlimited assets, unlimited beneficiaries, and unlimited Legacy letters.

The founders say Legacy Locker is easy to use and can be updated anywhere in the world. Users enter e-mail and photo-sharing account information in their locker.

For each account stored, users can designate a beneficiary or someone whom they want to receive their digital assets. At death, the assets are electronically sent to the beneficiaries.

Unlocking an Idea

Toeman, who has worked with Burg on and off for the past 12 years, said the idea to launch Legacy Locker came from a two experiences in his life -- one positive and one negative.

When Toeman's 94-year-old grandmother, an avid e-mailer, passed away in summer 2007, the family wanted to access her e-mail account to let her friends know she had passed. Toeman said they weren't able to reach her friends all over the world because they didn't have access to her digital assets.

He also began thinking more about the service after he stared a family and visited an estate planner. The idea to start Legacy Locker came on a flight.

"What happens to my e-mail and (70 plus) domains at GoDaddy and PayPal and Facebook, Twitter and my blog?" Toeman said he asked himself. "It was that moment on the plane where everything hit me at the same time. I talked with a trusted advisers and estate planners and didn't have anyone tell me that I was crazy."

So Burg and Toeman began talking with estate planners, raised early funding from private sources, and launched the company. The two previously launched Palmtastik, an online service for Palm Pilot owners, and more recently cofounded Stage Two Consulting.

Need for Lockers

While any certified planner will encourage estate planning for a family, Toeman said, planners also responded to Legacy Locker.

While more than 12.5 million U.S. households with children under the age of 18 have established a will through a planner or downloaded software, according to information gathered from the U.S. Census and a survey by Lexus Nexus, Toeman said Legacy fills a need.

Legacy's founders plan to tap into the U.S. market of 25,000 estate-planning attorneys who are creating 900,000 new wills each year by offering Legacy Locker as a supplemental service.

"So far we have talked to individual estate planners and received a lot of feedback, and our goal is to go to the bigger industry and get involved in their process," Toeman said.