Since its version 1.0 launch in late 2007, PamFax has provided an easy-to-use web-based fax service, that allows you to send faxes worldwide without any hardware requirements. Initially a fax sending service, PamFax 2.0 introduced features such as a Windows print driver, support for Mac and Linux and inbound faxing to a local number in your area code in 25 countries.

Over the past week Scendix, producer of the cloud-based PamFax service launched PamFax 3.0 with a focus on improving delivery speed, scalability, robustness and access. But to meet these goals they had to start over from scratch, building a newly architected back end that also incorporated new hardware to meet the growing demand for the service.

New features include:

• Faster fax delivery – in my recent experience, the new service was delivering faxes in one to three minutes as opposed to 15 to 30 minutes under the previous setup
• More registration/login options: Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and several others
• Two plans for fax-in numbers:
  • Basic: provides fax-in number for 12 months that allows you to receive an unlimited number of faxes
  • Professional: provides fax-in number for twelve months, 20 fax pages to Zone 1 recipients per month and 33% discount for additional pages, unlimited storage of send and received faxes and “My Company” PamFax Manager to sign up employees and delegate PamFax credits as well as report on company fax activities.
• Three free fax pages upon sign-up to check out the service
• Every new registrant will receive a free Basic Plan for three months, including a fax-in number
• Free faxing from PamFax to a PamFax fax-in number.
• PamFax API’s – allows you to fully embed the PamFax functionality easily and quickly into your application or device

PamFax continues to offer:

• A simple, straight forward five or six step process for sending a fax
• Fax from a Windows/Mac/Linux client or online via a web browser
• Operation from any web browser worldwide with no additional hardware requirement.
• A portal to manage your fax activity
• Fax status messages to e-mail, SMS and/or Skype chat
• No minimum commitments
• Support for over 100 file formats
• Payment either pay-as-you-go or via PamFax Credit packs
• No contracts or ongoing obligations

Often my posts on PamFax bring up the question of “who’s using faxes today”? With various alternatives for exchanging documents electronically, one would think that faxing is becoming passé. However, with billions of fax machines still attached to phone lines and the ongoing need for “recognized originals”, such as contract execution signatures, Scendix reports that their monthly page volumes continues to grow at a significant pace. And, were the market not still a significant one, Scendix would not have invested their resources since last summer in the  very extensive development of the PamFax 3.0 platform.

Yet, with PamFax, fax activity can become paperless and “totally green”. Sending documents involves simply attaching a document (in over 100 formats) during the fax set up process unless it is one that has to be scanned in. While there are options for printing received faxes, they can also simply be read on the user’s PamFax portal and printed only when absolutely necessary.

The Scendix team has prepared an “office drama” introductory video about how PamFax brings relief to the frustrations of faxing:

An introduction to PamFax from PamFax on Vimeo.

Voice On The Web posts about PamFax

Related articles by Zemanta

• PamFax Adds Linux Edition; Scendix Demonstrates the Power of Web Services (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Tungle.Me 2.0 – Meeting Acceleration Through Participant Aggregation (voiceontheweb.biz)
• It’s Been a Week for New Skype Video Experiences (voiceontheweb.biz)

Skype has always been challenged with respect to making its growing feature set available on the most popular operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The major ongoing complaint from Skype users has been features on a new release for one OS that don’t appear on the other OS’s clients that may not be updated for up to a year later. With respect to Skype’s developer platform, a major complaint of third party developers has been the lack of any web services tools to embed Skype into web-based applications.

But maybe Scendix, publisher of PamFax and Pamela, is showing us how to make applications OS-agnostic such that all versions of an application get new features concurrently.

Since its launch in December 2007, although it was not obvious to the end users at the time, PamFax has been largely a web-based application, starting with PamFax for Windows. For the next sixteen months, the Scendix PamFax team worked not only to release PamFax 2.0 but also put resources into building a more robust back end, adding support of Fax-in numbers in 26 countries and extending their OS support to make available PamFax for Mac OS X. And subsequent upgrades have made it a more robust, lower cost and multi-lingual service.

Earlier this week Scendix announced the release of PamFax for Linux, bringing low cost, worldwide faxing to all those rabid Linux users who espouse the virtues of a very robust, yet open and feature rich operating system. In so doing, Scendix has, in practice, demonstrated how to make an application OS-agnostic, essentially by building a single website dedicated to the application.

So what did Scendix need to do to make their application run under Linux? After all, they had a core web-based engine supporting the entire feature set. Three steps:

• Build an installer package for each version of Linux supported
• test PamFax’s operation in each operating system environment, and
• perform integration with Skype for Linux (there is an option to send notifications to a Skype chat session)

But there was no need to build a new application or backend – as shown on the left, even the user interface is the same. Its web-services architecture simply needed the modifications described above. Bottom line: PamFax is basically an OS-agnostic “Software as a Service” (“SaaS”) application. And limited developer resources are required to migrate support between OS’s. Effectively the operating system becomes secondary to the more universal web browser.

As their next step, the experience of bringing PamFax to this level has led Scendix to start work on PamFax 3.0, due for release later this spring. The major change here will be to migrate the PamFax web-based infrastructure to an API-based architecture such that PamFax can be readily embedded into third party applications – for instance, a WordPress plug-in that puts a “Fax This” icon on a web page would be one such potential application.

Bottom line: As we await Skype’s new developer platform, PamFax serves as a proxy for demonstrating why a web-services architecture would be an ideal transformation into providing Skype client access not only from Skype-specific clients but also from Skype embedded into a third party’s offering that incorporates Skype access without the need for opening a separate Skype client. In other words, another key link towards building “Skype Everywhere”.

Note: Skype CEO Josh Silverman talks about this topic towards the end of the first half of our recent CES conversation.

Related articles by Zemanta

• PamFax Matures: Faster, Becomes More Business Friendly (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Three Developers and the Skype Platform Today! (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Skype for Linux Going to be Open Source (techie-buzz.com)
• Skype For Linux Is Opening Up (mashable.com)
• Skype for Business: An Interview with Skype’s Matt Jordan (voiceontheweb.biz)
• InnerPass 2.0 – Exposing Skype’s Collaboration Potential to Over Two Million Users (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Paul Tagliamonte: What is Linux? (paultags.com)

Recently launched PamFax 2.0 had three key new features:

• Mac OSX compatible (in addition to Windows)
• Lower “per page” pricing by up to 40%, and
• Fax-In numbers in 27 countries

Signing up for a one year subscription to acquire a fax-in number is about a five minute process when you subscribe to PamFax Professional. What makes it possible to so easily obtain a “local” number in any of over one hundred cities in 27 countries? Short answer: Voxbone.

I first learned about Voxbone’s services when they were a major sponsor of eComm 2008 a year ago March. At the time CEO Rod Ullens told us how Voxbone was able to provision DID numbers in over 4000 cities in 47 countries worldwide at minimum cost. Last fall Voxbone launched their iNum service which creates “universal worldwide ‘local’ numbers” via the +883 country code. Customers for their basic DID services, who have been covered on Voice On The Web, include iSkoot, Calliflower, Mobivox,Truphone, OnState, Evoca and Voxeo.

When PamConsult CEO Dick Schiferli told me about their plans to add a receiving service to PamFax, they were looking for a way to easily provision and manage fax-in number subscriptions. At the time I introduced him to Voxbone’s Rod Ullens and the rest is history. But Voxbone does not simply provide fax-in numbers in 27 countries; according to a press release issued today:

Voxbone was uniquely equipped to bring several critical elements to Pamfax’s 2.0 offering:

• An inventory of direct-inward dial numbers (DIDs) in 4,000 cities and 47 countries, out of which 27 will initially be available to PamFax subscribers to use as their personal fax numbers;
• An IP interface to the telephone network that enables fax documents to be translated into TIFF or PDF data files;
• An API for the automated delivery of these faxes to any software or Web site.

In other words, Voxbone is equipped not simply to “make the connections” involved in receiving a fax but also to ensure that formatting and delivery automation is appropriately handled when receiving a fax via PamFax.

Bottom line: Through Voxbone, documents faxed to PamFax Fax-In customers are delivered as PDF files which can then be printed, sent as email attachments, archived or otherwise viewed and transferred at the recipient’s discretion.

For the past two years, I have been occasionally beta testing Tungle, a hosted meeting scheduler platform that now supports a range of popular Calendaring applications across Windows and Mac OSX PC’s as well as all the popular browsers, including Google Chrome. Tungle’s primary goal is to make scheduling meetings a simple process for both the meeting organizer and the invited participants.

Last Tuesday Tungle was launched to the general public; at the time I published a Web Worker Daily post: Tungle: Schedule Meetings “Your Way” where I covered in some detail the various business and user experience issues the Tungle team had uncovered and addressed leading up to this launch.

The Tungle browser interface provides availability information (for both yourself and any of your contacts who have authorized sharing of their availability information). Once participants have responded to narrow down to an appropriate time, either the organizer or last responding participant can set the time. This time is then automatically entered back into each participant’s individual PIM calendar. The full feature set can be found here.

Most important was their focus on the user experience, both for setting up the meeting and responding to invitations. In this regard the Tungle team:

• made the service entirely browser-based; there are no downloads required. Tungle will synchronize to your address book contacts and your PIM’s calendar; however, there is no trace left on your local PC.
• the invitation email sent out to meeting participants was worded to ensure a “no brainer” response to the invitation. Most importantly there is no need to sign up for the service when responding to the invitation
• made Tungle smartphone adaptable. Should an invitation be read on an iPhone, BlackBerry or other smartphone, it is reformatted in a manner appropriate to the underlying smartphone browser. Once again it is easy for an invitee to respond from their smartphone.
• established three calendar sharing options: detailed, busy/available and no sharing.
• set up automatic adjustment to the meeting participants’ time zone; most useful when scheduling international calls via Skype
• made it easier for participants to respond via a browser. For invitations received via a PC platform, the invitee is sent to a browser page where there are “bubble’s to guide the invitee through the response process.
• developed a simple “Meet With Me” service that one can put on a website or enter into an email signature to trigger a meeting request with the originator of the MeetWithMe URL.

Tungle, in some sense, could almost be considered the ultimate mashup:

• cross platform: works with both Windows and Mac OSX
• browser support: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome
• calendars supported: Outlook, MS Exchange, iCal, Google Calendar, Entourage, Lotus Live (Notes)
• Google Maps – this is a most impressive mashup: select the “Find a Location” link adjacent to the (optional) Location field, enter appropriate search terms and get results to select your meeting location.

Going forward Tungle is looking at integration with web conferencing services and social networking applications. But in the meantime I find it most useful for scheduling international Skype calls where time zone differences are not readily obvious.

Bottom line: give Tungle a try; simply register for the service and use it in your favorite browser; no downloads required. The best part: it’s free. There are plans to launch premium services later this year but at the moment Tungle’s goal is simply to make the service addictive.

Give Tungle a try and report on your experience in the Comments.

Other posts:

• Financial Times (free registration): Seats at the virtual table
• Web Worker Daily: Tungle: Schedule Meetings Your Way (also syndicated via GigaOm to New York Times and CNN Money)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Chrome Heads For Mac (ubergizmo.com)

Breaking News: Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor is to make a significant announcement at eComm 2009. Click on the eComm logo below to register.

When Dan York had to find a new employer in the fall of 2007, he kept hinting he had found a great employer but could not reveal it until he started his position. Turns out that Dan had become employed by one of the true innovators and success stories in the voice applications space: Voxeo, a vendor of IVR and VoIP platforms and services.

I have previously had the opportunity to interview Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor for a couple of stories (see links below). I find that Jonathan always has an interesting and informative story to tell. Voxeo is a case study in innovation leading to business success and is a sponsor of eComm 2009 (which means their business must be accelerating). Last week conference organizer Lee Dryburgh interviewed Jonathan and has put both the podcast and transcript up on the eComm 2009 website. Jonathan goes back to his unconventional roots in learning about telecomm and information technology and subsequently contributing to their convergence.

Voxeo turns out to be the outcome of his lack of deep exposure to, or history with, the business side of either telecomm or information technology but rather a passion to figure out “how things work” and “what customer pain” can be addressed by new products and services in a convergent world. He learned early on that, if I solve someone’s problem, the business will come.

In the interview he talks about:

• How he acquired, in one weekend, over 800 access numbers to bulletin boards in the days when “’We’re going to call your grandmother, but let’s only talk for a couple of minutes’.  Long distance was expensive.”
• How his activity led to a visit from the Secret Service. Turns out the Secret Service got a lesson in new communications technology from Jonathan and some of his acquaintances.
• His experience selling storage equipment and Novell Netware LAN’s to large BBS’s (including his first lesson on how  important email would become):

At the time, most BBS software was not multi-line, suffering on DOS, largely.  To build a large VBS [BBS?] was like thirty lines.  You would actually get thirty computers with one modem on each computer and connect them together with Novell NetWare.

• Moving from Sound Blaster to Dialogic cards to solve his problem of “There must be a way to connect a telephone to a computer”. And how it resulted in his first experience with an offering called ”Unified Messaging”: “We accidentally built a unified messaging platform.  We had no idea that there was a concept called Unified…” He went on to build his first business that eventually got sold to MediaGate.

I was thinking about what I wanted to do next.  I kept thinking back to when we first started developing the phone interface for the IRDG Unified Messaging product.  I was remembering, especially as someone not from a computer telephony or telephony background, how unbelievably arcane and difficult it was to get the Dialogic card working right, getting it to work consistently, and then dealing with phone companies to get T1 lines and Wink Start, Loop Start signaling, and DID’s and literally all the stuff I had never heard about. ….

… Right, but I had never heard of before.  I would sit down to have conversations with people and I literally had no idea what they were talking about.  I would just pretend I did and take notes, and then go home and try to figure it out.

• The other key learning from his first company: “’How is it that some of the largest companies in telecommunications don’t have enough people with enough experience to get all this stuff up and running?’  We’ve been doing telephony for eighteen months, now.”
• The three key words that resulted in starting Voxeo: “computer telephony sucks” So how did they make it not suck (in 1999)?

We roughly divided the problem into two domains.  First, it was incredibly difficult, especially outside of telephony, to create applications for the phone, learning all these API’s and the terminology.  We said what if we take web technology and apply it to the phone so you can build a voice application the same way you build a web application.  What would that look like?

The second domain was deployment.  We said rather than selling a box or software to people, and then they have to go deal with carriers or their local phone companies and all that strange terminology and process, we will just pre-deploy it all for customers, in our own data centers, and they can access that platform over the Internet.

Essentially, it was XML-driven telephony development, hosted or what we would now call Software as a Service or cloud-based deployment.

Jonathan then goes on to describe the evolution of VoiceXML, CallXML (built a prototype while at home with pneumonia) and CCXML that became core to Voxeo’s services and platforms. He also talks about being turned down by VC’s because he was only asking for $3 million; his solution to get funding: same business plan, ask for $30 million. And he talks about how Voxeo has leveraged web services into a space that did not understand the potential and value-add of web services a decade ago.

Go to Lee’s eComm 2009 blog post with both a link to the podcast as well as the transcript of the interview to get the full story. It makes a great case study in how technology evolves into a very successful business.

In closing, two comments:

• Columbia Data Products, where Jonathan was first employed, had tape drives that were a key module to a demonstration setup I used to manage for demonstrating graphics plotters for IBM mainframes and DEC/Data General mini-computers.
• At BBS Con which I attended in the summer of 1995, Jonathan should have stopped by the Quarterdeck booth to solve his problem of having a separate phone line for each BBS computer. A significant portion of Quarterdeck’s DESQview sales were to BBS operators so that they could have eight lines coming into a single PC.

Finally I have just confirmed with Lee Dryburgh that Jonathan will be speaking at eComm 2009 and making a significant announcement at that time. Register here and use “one touch” for a 20% discount.