Nigeria Content Online

Some scholars
credit the spread of fax machines as a factor in the downfall of the
Soviet Union. Good for the fax. But that’s pretty much been the lone
high point for the venerable device in the last 25 years. Since the
fall of the Iron Curtain, faxing has been a joke. It’s one of the most
expensive, least flexible, and most annoying ways to send documents in
the digital age. Everyone knows this-even, I’ll bet, the people who
make fax machines. Faxing requires special equipment (the machine, a
phone line), it’s stationary (I’m guessing you’ve never sent a fax from
a plane), it wastes paper, and it’s a hassle. Yet for all its
well-known limitations, faxing persists. How often are you asked by
someone-your bank, your insurance company, your lawyer-to “please sign
this and fax it back”? If it’s less than once a month, consider
yourself blessed.

The main reason
faxing lives on, of course, is because of another ancient and
mystifying custom: signing a piece of paper to make it official. God
only knows why this fetish persists. Many countries have laws allowing
for electronic signatures on documents, but it’s the rare institution
that will accept your click as proof of agreement. So it seems we’re
stuck. As long as people want to see your scribble on a piece of paper,
you need to have a fax machine, or at least a way to approximate one.

I don’t have a fax
machine in my home office. I don’t own a scanner, either. (I don’t want
to give manufacturers of either cursed device the satisfaction.) For a
long time, I would just ask my wife-who has a job in a real office,
surrounded by squealing faxes-to do my faxing for me. Over the last
year or so, though, I’ve increasingly relied on JotNot, an app that
turns my iPhone into a scanner. JotNot is terrific at what it aims to
do. To scan a page, you snap a picture of it and crop and scale it with
a few on-screen swipes; JotNot then processes it into a PDF. But this
is still somewhat tedious, especially if you’ve got lots of pages to
scan.

Last week, I
finally found what I’ve been looking for: a way to sign and fax-or
e-mail-a document using just my computer. It doesn’t require you to
print out your forms or sign them with a pen. You will need a camera,
but only once; after that, it’s painless. The system is called
HelloFax. And it’s terrific.

Here’s how
HelloFax works. First, you sign a blank piece of paper. Then you take a
picture of your signature and send it to the site. Now you’re free to
sign and send documents that you’ve got stored digitally. (In other
words, HelloFax is only for e-mailing and faxing files that you can
find online or that people have e-mailed you; you can’t use it to fax a
physical document.) To begin, you upload your form to HelloFax. The
system understands a wide range of file types, including PDFs, Word
documents, and several more esoteric ones. HelloFax transforms the
document into an image, and then it lets you add text to that image;
this allows you to fill out your name, age, SSN, and other information
on virtually any kind of form. Because HelloFax treats your document as
an image, you do have to manually position the cursor in each box-in
other words, you can’t hit tab to go from field to field-but I still
found it pretty easy to do.

When you’re done
filling in your form, click “Add Signature” and HelloFax will pop in
the scribble that you photographed earlier. (It has controls to let you
move and scale your John Hancock to look just right.) Finally, enter
the fax number or e-mail address of your recipient, and boom! You’ve
just faxed something, and you didn’t even have to leave your chair.

There have been
other services that purport to let you fax from computers. But none of
these is as straightforward as HelloFax; either they don’t allow you to
fill out documents on your computer (which means you’ve got to print
out and scan, at which point you might as well get a fax machine) or
they require you to download software. HelloFax, by contrast, is a Web
site, so you don’t need to download anything and it works everywhere.
(It doesn’t work very well on smartphone browsers, though.) For now,
HelloFax is free, but it will send faxes only to U.S. numbers and it
imposes a 20-fax limit, after which you’ve got to ask the site to let
you fax some more. (The company’s FAQ says: “If you [exceed the limit],
email us at support@hellofax.com with some feedback and, if you’re
nice, we’ll give you some more free pages.”) It also doesn’t yet
receive faxes. The company is working on a paid service that lifts the
limit and allows you to get faxes, but it hasn’t announced a price.

How much should
you pay for such a service? Fax machines sell for as little as $40,
which is just $3 a month for a year. If HelloFax charges any more than
that, then it might not seem worth it. But that’s the wrong way to
calculate things: Compared with printing out, filling in, and feeding
sheets of paper by hand, HelloFax is a dream. I’d pay $5 a month-or
even $2 per fax-just for the ease of use. And unlike a fax machine,
HelloFax can also e-mail documents. It’s almost worth it just as a tool
for filling out and sending tax and insurance forms.

HelloFax is a
small startup, and though I’m hoping everyone begins to use it, it’s a
bit early to predict that it can kill the fax machine. The idea of
digitizing your signature could be catching on far beyond HelloFax,
though. Last week, Apple unveiled a developer release of Mac OS
10.7-known as Lion-which includes a slick Signature Capture app that
works just like the one in HelloFax. You autograph a piece of paper and
hold it up to your Mac’s camera; the system captures and processes your
signature, which is then available to all your programs. I’m hoping
Microsoft, Adobe, and other companies adopt the convention, allowing
you to insert your signature into Word, Acrobat, and every other office
program. That’s probably a few years off (Lion is scheduled to be
released only this summer). Still, it’s clear that the fax machine’s
death warrant has been signed. I can’t wait to dance on its grave.

New York Times