Last week a 10-year-old Silicon Valley company that
specializes in the innards of fax machines changed its name
-- and stock trading symbol -- from Jet Fax to eFax.com. The
bet, begun last summer with some market research, is on a
sort of fax version of popular e-mail services such as
HotMail. Instead of a free e-mail address you get a free fax
number. Mine is 630-604-0178. Send anything you like. I
don't need to go sift through the office fax mess, and the
number won't be busy when I'm online at home tying up the
dataline. You won't even be wasting my paper or
compromising my privacy -- within a minute or so of the
completed fax transmission, eFax.com sends me the fax as
an e-mail attachment that I can pick up from wherever I check
my e-mail. There's a special eFax viewer for Windows users
that's supposed to get the file size down (and also offers an
encryption option), but I opted for the plain vanilla TIFF
format because I mostly read my e-mail on a Mac. Guess
what? It works. MORE>>
'New' Net Company Offers Free Fax Numbers
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If the rule with Internet empire-building is audience -- not
profits -- then what's next to give away after home pages,
directories, e-mail, chat, greeting cards and even magazine
content? How about a free fax number?