HelloFax got one step closer to its goal of eliminating the fax machine this week with the service's integration into Google Drive.
HelloFax's Google Drive integration allows you to fax any document from Google Drive, as well as receive faxes from others in a special HelloFax folder within the drive. The service also allows you edit and sign PDF documents in your browser, removing the need to print important documents to sign and then scan them back into your computer to print them –everything can be done paperless.
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“Our objective as a company is to end faxing everywhere for everyone” HelloFax CEO Joseph Walla told Mashable. “It's so wasteful. It's environmentally unfriendly, and it's a waste of time”
HelloFax started out as a weekend project for Walla and his co-founder Neal O'Mara, a project that quickly grew into much more. While initially just a simple faxing app, the the two later added the ability to edit and sign documents in your browser.
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“What we found out is that the only reason people fax things is that the vast majority of these documents are being signed” says Walla. He says millions of people are searching regularly online for faxing, but very few are looking for electronic signature.
“What we've found is a lot of people joined us for faxing, and now they've converted to electronic signatures.We have a lot users who were fax users and now they don't fax at all”
HelloFax is currently used worldwide, and has gained a tremendous amount of traction particularly in Silicon Valley, where it is used by number of startups and even some larger companies.
When asked what's it's like to have a business with the main goal of essentially ending the industry its a part of, Walla compared HelloFax to its new partner Google.
“We see faxing the way Google probably sees Android. It's this way of expanding and protecting its core business which is search. Our core business is documents and document signing, and faxing is just this transmission method that hasn't gone away.”
The company actually stopped working on the fax portion of its service over a year ago, and is now focusing development efforts on e-signatures.
In addition to Google Drive, HelloFax is also integrated with Dropbox and Box. If you sign up for the service now through Google Drive you can get 50 free fax pages per month as well as unlimited signature requests and document signing.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
