Spotlight

Technology:

eFax

Believe me, I'm as surprised as you are, that a reference to fax has wiggled itself into the Technology column of the ACT Spotlight. After all this is a place for cool, new technologies and not those that, for all practical reasons, should be dead now. Well, the fact is, people still print electronic documents in order to send them via... fax, rather than simply as e-mail attachments. Some people I know print their e-mail messages and store them neatly in folders in file cabinets... Don't ask me why, because I haven't a clue. The "paperless office" is turning more trees into one-sided printouts than anything before it.

eFax, however, is such a refreshing take on this old technology that it makes it (almost) new and exciting. It is also one of the best examples of successful implementations of the ASP concept. You see, with eFax you can send and receive faxes without having access to a fax machine. Best of all, you can remove paper from the process entirely.

There are 2 basic subscription models to eFax: Free (as in "free lunch", i.e. no cost to the subscriber) and Plus (costing $4.95 per month). In the free package the subscriber receives a telephone number (to be dialed by the senders of faxes) and a small (3 MB) software application called eFax Messenger. When a fax is sent to the specified number, it becomes converted to an e-mail attachment and arrives in subscriber's Inbox, ready to be viewed in the eFax Messenger, where it can be viewed, rotated (in case someone sent it upside-down), zoomed-in, annotated, and - alas - printed out onto paper. The faxes can be sent from another eFax account or from a standard fax machine - they'll arrive at their destination in the same way: via e-mail. Users of cellular phones with e-mail capability can also choose to receive notifications of received faxes to be picked up with the next batch of e-mail on their PCs.

However, the Free eFax service does not allow sending faxes and the fax numbers assigned to subscribers are outside their local area, requiring the senders to incur long-distance charges. Both limitations are removed in the Plus version, which also throws in a handful of additional goodies, such as: the ability to convert faxes to text via OCR, online storage space for faxes, fax auto-distribute, even a personal 1-800 number (with additional usage cost) to enable the sending of faxes at no cost to the sender. It is also worth nothing that both the Free and Plus versions of the service offer voicemail capability, with the option of receiving one's voicemail as compressed sound files attached to e-mail messages. Now, that is clearly new and cool!

Being a very infrequent user of fax I opted for the free version and have been very satisfied with it so far. Nonetheless, I do believe that the paid version is well worth the relatively small expense, especially for individuals and small organizations who will appreciate the savings on fax hardware, the ability to receive important faxes in multiple locations, the opportunity to convert the dedicated fax line to other uses, and the chance to, finally, start saving those trees... (pipe dream, I know).

eFax Messenger (click on a thumbnail):

Fax viewer	Annotating a fax

For more information please visit the eFax site.

Conference:

ED-MEDIA 2000

World Conference on Educational Multimedia/Hypermedia and Educational Telecommunications
Held June 26-July 1, 2000 in Montreal, Canada
Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), this annual conference serves as a multi-disciplinary forum for the discussion and exchange of information on the research, development, and applications on all topics related to multimedia/hypermedia and distance education.

Initiatives:

TechSoup.org: The Technology Place for Nonprofits

Last month CompuMentort launched a non-profit technology portal, TechSoup.org, a one-stop resource aimed at the 650,000 small to midsize nonprofit, with the stated mission to "avoid the redundancy resulting from having multiple technology assistance agencies each developing the same methodologies and resources. TechSoup will collect, analyze, organize, prioritize, and present the best of the best in technology resources and information.".
Current services include:

Personalization of the portal via My TechSoup
Discounts on technology products and services for nonprofits
Organizing of all the technology resources into topical areas, such as: Hardware, Software, Training, Consultants
Glossary of technological terms
Downloadable freeware and demos
Technology assessment worksheets
Monthly newsletter
Stories from the field of nonprofit technology

Planned services include:

Job listings
Product reviews
Information and resources for the Community Technology Centers (CTCs)
Equipment inventories
Message boards for members
Special reports

Online reading:

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

JCMC is a scientific, refereed, quarterly journal. The journal seeks to publish original essays and research reports on such topics as interpersonal and group processes in communication networks, issues of privacy, economics and access raised by the developing information infrastructure, instructional communication in distance learning, computer-supported cooperative work, and organizational and social policy issues occasioned by the new medium. JCMC is a joint project of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and the Information Systems Division of School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Editors are Margaret McLaughlin and Sheizaf Rafaeli.

She said, he said:

"I believe in the technology; it's the humans I distrust." -- Steve Fox (in reference to Gnutella).

No. 20

June 13, 2000