When a business converts to faxing over the internet, they suddenly have a problem with their old fax machine. This bulky machine is taking up space in the office that could be used for a bigger printer, shelving for reams of paper or even left empty to make the office look cleaner. However, simply throwing it into the garbage bin is not environmentally friendly. Here are three easy and low-cost options that will get rid of that machine and make Mother Earth smile.

1. Recycling Most big cities have places that will accept old fax machines and either fully recycle them and/or refurbish them for resale. Find a recycling company near you at the Environmental Protection Agency.
2. Nation-wide Donations If your town doesn’t have an office equipment recycling company, consider donating it to the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Earth911.com has a great list of recycling options that accept mailed office equipment for recycling. An important note with fax machines is that you should recycle the machine and the ink/toner separately. There is a good list of national charities that accept recycled office equipment at UsedComputer.com.
3. Charitable Donations Also, consider donating your machine to a local charity. If you belong to a church, ask them if they have an employee who could use a personal fax machine. Is there a school in your neighborhood? Non-profit groups often have financial limitations, so donations help them considerably. What’s more, your donation may even be tax deductable. States usually have a recycling program on their website that might include Charities. (For instance, Massachusetts has a page set up on their site: http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/ecycling/live.htm.) Go to your state website and see what they have listed online.

Do you have any other ways that you recycle your old office equipment that you can share? Let us know! Photo by Abhisek Sarda

Faxing has become one of those technologies that you can’t do without.

Do you ever have those moments in life when you wonder how people survived in the past without a certain technology? I often ask my mother how she grew up on the Texas coast without air conditioning and she always says “we didn’t know any better”.

Every time I send a fax online, I wonder the same thing. The introduction of the fax to the mainstream business world started a worldwide shift in how we do business. Things didn’t halt for a few days waiting on the client to get the contract and then have it sent back. It set up the current ideology that we can have things now rather than later.

If you needed to get a document to someone in the past, you would have to hire a courier or package delivery service especially if it needed to get there overnight. This involved putting the document together, calling the courier, giving it to them only to have them put it on a plane (or delivery truck), hope and pray that something bad doesn’t happen and then have the document handed to the person it was meant for.

If you lived close, this was a fairly quick process, but what if you wanted to get a document from Miami to Seattle in the late-1950s? Very rarely would it happen overnight unless you sent one of your employees to Seattle and even that might be pushing it.

Luckily, the fax machine has changed all of that. Many think that it was invented in the 1980s and they will be surprised to find out that fax technology was actually created in 1843 by a little known Scotsman named Alexander Bain. The telegraph machine had been created by Samuel Morse in 1835 and Mr. Bain used that technology to help evolve his idea of “improvements in producing and regulating electric currents and improvements in timepieces and in electric printing and signal telegraphs”.

While the telegraph machine sent dots and dashes across the world, Alexander Bain’s machine used a stylus mounted on a pendulum that would scan a flat metal surface containing images.

This was a breakthrough in communications during a time when new inventions seemed to happen every day. Since that time, the fax machine was improved upon by several different inventors.

• 1850 – F.C. Blakewell invented the Copying Telegraph.
• 1860 – The first fax was sent between Paris and Lyon using a Pantelegraph, invented by Giovanni Caselli.
• 1895 – A watchmaker from America named Ernest Hummel invented the Telediagraph.
• 1902 – Dr. Arthur Korn took a big leap when he invented the Photoelectric System.
• 1914 – Edouard Belin realized the benefits of using remote fax for journalism.
• 1924 – Politicians got involved and started using the Telephotography Machine to send political convention photographs to newspapers. AT&T developed the machine.
• 1926 – RCA created the Radiophoto which faxed documents using radiowaves.
• 1947 – The very first successful fax machine as we know it was invented by Alexander Muirhead.
• 1955 – First radio fax transmission was sent to the other side of the continent.

In the past 5-10 years, the biggest improvement has been online fax machine technology. It helps to save on paper costs and can be lightning fast. It also allows the receiver to file the fax virtually so that it can be referenced quickly in the future. You simply send the fax with your computer and the receiver gets it. What could be faster than that? Telepathic faxing, maybe?

The next time you are sending a fax, be it physically or by internet fax, think about all of those thinkers before you that worked hard to bring this technology to fruition and ask yourself, how did we live without it?

Photo by cliff1066™

So you’ve finally ditched your bulky fax machine in favor of online faxing in order to save on paper and ink. In these tough economic times, a paperless office seems like a wise idea especially when you have so many digital tools at your disposal. However, there are times when documents need signatures, and if you don’t know how to sign documents electronically, this may mean having to print, sign, and scan every document before faxing it back.

In only four simple steps, you can create an electronic signature for any document:

In a nutshell, all you need to do is:

1. Sign a blank sheet of paper.
2. Scan or fax the signature to yourself in order to digitize it.
3. Create a bitmap using a simple graphic editing program like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop.
4. Open the RingCentral Call Controller, add the signature to the stamp gallery and start adding your electronic signature to any document with a simple click.

More detailed information can be found here.

Pretty simple instructions, but what happens if you’ve already gotten rid of your fax machine and scanner or simply don’t have one? Digital Inspiration made some great suggestions on a recent blog post that include downloading apps to your iPhone like “Fountain Pen” or “Sketch Pad” in order to draw your signature, making a digital copy using your digital camera, or using a web-based program like Live Signature to get your John Hancock digitized. It all may sound a little daunting, but keep in mind that digitizing your signature is a one time event that puts that much closer to a true paperless office.

As always, we welcome your suggestions, so do tell us in the comments section how you’ve digitized your signature. I’m sure you all have plenty of recommendations, and we can’t wait to hear about them.

Web-based, online faxing eliminates waste and reduces costs. But why should anyone care?

The way fax machines (or office machines with fax capability) are sold today are as loss leaders. Meaning that a business fax machine vendor is willing to break even or lose money on selling it through Best Buy because the ink is designed to run out quickly – and the profit margins on fax machine ink cartridges can be 100% to 300%. Incidentally, a typical 4 person small office can pay three times the cost of the fax machine in the first 12 months of operation. So the cost savings of having a PC-based Internet fax service that runs over the Web is obvious (not to mention the trees saved) but the true price of not having Internet faxing capabilities is in what MBA’s call “opportunity cost.”

Internet fax services (also called “virtual fax” or “web fax”) let a user click twice to send a fax – and the sent & received record is digital. How many times have we heard, “can you resend that fax?” Or “let me run to our fax machine and check…” Already, law firms and medical offices have seen a surge in Internet fax services usage as a better, more compliant way to have sent & receipt records of fax correspondence.

The lack of being able to securely sign a Microsoft Word document and send it via Internet fax is mostly a thing of the relative past, as Adobe Acrobat now allows users to easily insert digital signatures (with automated date & time stamps) into most any document. Then a couple of mouse-clicks through the Internet fax service and that document is sent. One can send it to multiple entities and multiple recipients can have records of it. It also means that you don’t see employees waiting for a fax confirmation, loading pages into a machine, or hearing a fast busy signal when the fax machine is dialing out. Total up the minutes per employee saved each year and it probably adds up to a couple thousand dollars per year for a typical 4 person small office.

Which brings us to the most interesting element of Internet fax services – that they make fax documents a collaborative productivity tool for business. It sounds trivial, but once a small business turns to Internet Faxing, it’s like being able to keep in touch with your fax documents throughout your office much like the way Email allows better, faster group communications. And it will be the last time anyone in that office hears, “Did anyone get that fax?”

It’s hard to miss these days. Virtualization is the biggest trend, topic and force in information technology. Amazon’s virtual compute cloud services called AWS have taken the world by storm as even enterprise buyers line up to consume virtual compute power on the fly. IT consumers are focused less and less on the hardware and stack supporting the service and more and more on simply consuming the value delivered over the internet on demand.

Yet despite this revolution, some of us still don’t have an online fax service (you know who you are). Instead of using an e-mail fax (or electronic fax) solution, they continue to receive paper faxes available only in one physical location in the world. The irony? Some of them are sipping coffee reading the latest best seller on their Kindle electronic reader while waiting for a proposal to drop out of their paper fax machine. Its 2009 and it’s information’s job to find us, not the other way around.

So for those numerous hangers-on, I thought I’d make a list of the top reasons it is absolutely time to adopt an online fax service.

1. Travel is a reality: The simple argument for directing all faxes to an electronic fax–you probably travel. Why deal with the hassle of asking someone to pick up a fax for you while you’re gone or tolerate the risk an important fax will be overlooked while you are gone? You carry that smart phone for a reason, use it. Read your faxes instantly in e-mail as soon as you receive them anywhere in the world.
2. Let information follow you: Point one is so important, I want to say it again a different way. Its 2009 and information serves us now. It finds us through RSS feeds and status updates. We no longer have to wait for the physical TV to spit out the shows we want, we watch them electronically on Tivo or, for the truly advanced, Hulu.com. Don’t rush home from soccer practice to receive a fax. Read it wherever you are in the wold and stop for a tasty smoothie with the kids. There… isn’t that better?
3. Speed: Forwarding simplicity: It’s easier to forward an electronic fax. You just hit forward in your e-mail and it’s on its way. Why waste your time typing in five phone numbers of other people who need to see the document? You can also fire off a quick acknowledgement with notes to the sender. Internet fax is a faster fax.
4. Reliability: Unlike some fax machines, the internet is almost always on and working. There is no toner to run out or a line for the cat to pull out of the back. Have you ever hassled with a fax machine? If you own one, the answer is probably yes.
5. Green savings: E-mail based fax services are more affordable than ever. They deliver all of the above benefits, push you into 21st century thinking, and are still cheaper than a dedicated phone line approach to faxing. They are also greener–no paper or toner unless you decide its important enough to print. Everyone loves trees, so lets try to keep them around. Faxing accounts for 5% of office paper use! Want to be 5% greener tomorrow? Switch to an e-mail fax solution today.

Photos by Abhisek Sarda and geishaboy500

As part of mundane office life, fax machines couldn’t avoid becoming targets or props in comedy. Among the most famous are probably the faxes from the future in season 3 of “The Office.” But faxes can come from all over the place, including, apparently, outer space:

The road warrior who doesn’t take advantage of internet faxing has to find another way to send and receive hard copy documents. Maybe this is how they do it:

Not all fax “humor” is funny, though. Fax spam is bad enough. There’s something darkly twisted about wasting your paper and ink on sending you advertisements for special deals on paper and ink. Pranksters can be worse. The traditional “practical jokes” include the black page, which is basically faxing someone a completely black page that eats up fax ink. The other annoying prank is the endless page. This involves a long sheet of paper with the ends fastened together to make a large loop. Since the looped page never ends, their fax machine keeps sending and sending until you either hang up, or your fax machine runs out of ink or paper. Since most of these are done at late-night hours over the weekend, the chances of someone seeing what’s going on and stopping it are pretty slim. Some older machines will actually break under the stress of printing continuously for hours.

Of course, both of these assume you use paper and toner. Online fax doesn’t print a thing until you want it to. And since it records the number where the offending fax is coming from, you can then block it. But if you’re still concerned about those faxes from space, you can always join the Million Fax March on Washington to learn the truth.

So long as business requires that we sign on the dotted line, there will always be a need for fax technology. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll always need fax machines, however. Whether you call it email fax, online fax, electronic fax, or internet fax, it all amounts to the same thing: faxing without ink and paper.

On average, we each consume 10,000 sheets of paper every year. That’s more than an entire tree for each of us to print, mail, and fax a year’s worth of business documents. Fax machines are the most notorious wasters of paper. First, cover sheets consume extra paper with every legitimate fax we send. Even worse, all that fax spam, advertising cheap toner cartridges or the neighborhood lunch spot (complete with three-page menu of course), eats up paper as well.

Chunking the machine and just using a solution that allows you to fax online helps not just you, but also the environment. Email faxes are not printed unless they need to be. This includes the spam faxes (which the better fax online systems allow you to block by phone number). That saves paper and trees, and also ink. This sort of conservation can have a “trickle-up effect”. According to business consultant Heather Clancy, “paper production is second only to petroleum in terms of energy used by U.S. industries.” Using significantly less paper can have a ripple effect on our environment. Trees prevent soil erosion, scrub carbon dioxide from the air and convert it to oxygen. Not cutting them down, transporting them to a factory, reducing them to paper, and then shipping that paper to stores reduces pollution at every step, saves energy, and limits the amount of fossil fuels that need to be consumed in the process, from the trucks used to transport trees and paper, to the (usually) coal-fired power plants needed to run the paper factories. And that reduces the amount of drilling or mining required, and so on.

The quest for the paperless office might be a dated, ‘90s convention, but that’s no reason to waste paper, ink, and energy running a fax machine all the time, or endure the endless flood of fax spam. Internet fax cuts us free of the endless cycle of paper consumption, the documents that need to be filed or destroyed, and the advertisements that eat up the irreplaceable minutes of our business day.

Photo credits: krossbow, dok1

Even after over a decade of fighting for the paperless office, the faxes remain. There are simply too many things that require a signature, too many hand-written notes, and too many hand-filled forms. So the fax endures, but not so much the fax machine. Online faxing, that uses your internet connection rather than a separate physical device, is growing in popularity. Dedicated internet fax services now boast millions of subscribers. Here are the top five reasons to reassign your fax machine to door-stop duty.

1.One less physical hunk of iron in your office. Even if desk-space isn’t scarce, you’ll appreciate not having to feed it toner and paper, deal with it jamming, or having to get it serviced.

2.Send and receive from anywhere. If you can get a ‘net connection, you can send a fax. Fax from the coffee shop or from home in your pajamas. There’s no need to make a special trip to the office or the copy store just to send a single page.

3.Alerts let you know when a document has arrived. You can be told via email or text message to your cellphone that you’ve received a fax. Know right away, wherever you are, that the document you’re waiting on has finally arrived.

4.Maintain electronic copies. Need a copy of that contract you signed three months ago? Internet faxes can be stored and retrieved just like your other digital documents. And with fax logs, you’ll be able to see who sent them, what their phone number is, and the result of the transaction.

5.Fax directly from your word processor. There’s no need to print out a document you want faxed. If your faxing service supports your word processing or number crunching software, you can send it right from your computer without even having to get up. It might not get you the paperless office of your dreams, but it will reduce the amount of time you spend shuffling papers back and forth.

Photo credits: Abhisek Sarda, anomalous4