Fax machines have been one of those must-have office accessories for years. Sure, we’ve had e-mail pretty much since the Internet became so widely available, but it’s just not practical to scan the document into Photoshop and e-mail an image to the recipient.
Some new technologies like AccuRoute have been emerging, which allow the user to scan a hard copy right into a document on the computer, but that’s probably not something that will completely kill off faxing.
So, it looks like fax machines are here to stay – right? Well, HelloFax is bringing fax technology to a new level. The electronic signature specialist is in favor of more environmentally friendly, digital alternatives.
And just how does it plan to do that? Google (News - Alert) Drive.
Google unleashed the anticipated cloud storage service into the wild just last month – which is essentially a more powerful and mature iteration of Docs. Considering its integration with a handful of Google’s cloud-based media and productivity apps, Drive seemed ideal for working with faxes.
The major drawback though, is HelloFax’s lack of support for talking to traditional fax machines. Really, there’s a pretty fine line between this solution and the others that are already out there. Not to send the wrong message; it’s still a breakthrough in the effort to go more “green” and eliminate the need for paper as much as possible, but it only meets the needs of the companies who are already choosing PDFs over paper.
That may not be too big of an issue though - HelloFax says that a ton of its customers are dropping paper and going digital all the time. The thing that tends to scare most would-be clients away is the lack of support for hand written signatures – but methods of digital signing have been around for ages, and they’re only growing in popularity.
“What we found out is that the only reason people fax things is that the vast majority of these documents are being signed. A lot of people [are joining] us for faxing, and now they’ve converted to electronic signatures. We have a lot of users who were fax users and now they don’t fax at all,” said Joseph Walla in an interview with Mashable.
When paired with cloud solutions such as Google Docs and DropBox, HelloFax might have the potential to wean a lot of users off those antique fax machines – but can it really kill off such a widely used product any time soon?
Edited by Juliana Kenny