The shocking thing about this is that there must still be enough Faxes being sent to actually justify this new product.
Where are they still used at 'scale'?
Where are they still used at 'scale'?
They're pervasive in finance, insurance, employee benefits, etc.
They're also a good one-to-many API multiplexer. So many businesses can take a fax and have a human operate on it that many software companies can use them to add actuators to their software without having to bizdev the company into adding an actual API integration.
This is how these marketplaces can confirm someone is there to actually receive the order and provide that feedback to the customer that their order has been received.
I think (but am not sure) that they can provide time estimates through the IVR system as well.
But holding a PDF of same is not.
So it's easier/cheaper for a restaurant to have a dedicated phone line for faxing (plus fax and supplies) than connect a printer to a PC?
Is this because someone needs to actually print incoming emails or orders? And if yes, is there an opportunity for some kind of software solution that would always print what it receives, with no human intervention?
It requires a lot less employee training to maintain and operate a fax machine. Can you build a better mousetrap?
If there's a software gap here, it's being filled as features in modern Point Of Sale systems. That space is really crowded right now (Revel, Clover, Toast, 'more modern' offerings from legacy providers like Micros and NCR). There may be an opportunity to provide a more niche offering rather than a comprehensive solution like those, but the space is far from empty.
But ok, if the fax and the phone line cost next to nothing and it "just works", then sure it makes a lot of sense.
They can (and do!) put the fax machine right by the kitchen.
If you have lots of friends in the restaurant business and am itching to get into sales, there's a cottage-industry that fits between a $50 on-sale inkjet printer, and $1000 high-end HP, but it includes on-site installation, configuration, and support.
Some restaurants moved towards having tablets and receiving order via an app, but I'd guess that fax is still an option since it's difficult to integrate with a bunch of different POS systems and there are also a fair amount of restaurants that use hand written tickets to communicate orders to a kitchen.
I wouldn't be surprised if this Fax API is the same technology that those companies use to fax orders to restaurants.
I've seen tablets in cafes at the front of the house, and sometimes the cashier (who can't touch food while they're also touching money) copies the order off the tablet and onto a piece of paper and passes it off to the kitchen the old fashioned way, while acknowledging it was received on the tablet.
So they send a lot of them.
For some reason the fax is legally sounder than email.
I suspect that faxes have been around for so long, and tested in court so many times, that by this time they are as good as holding the original if a lawsuit were to happen.
- sign - scan (usually sent as a weird filename to your corporate email) - save the attachment, rename the file, create a new email, attach the file, send
Laws for your use case will be different. That's mine.
They are viewed as "safe" for credit card information, as opposed to emails.
Unknown as to why these manufacturers don't provide an online payment system. I work with several that want faxes, and they aren't small companies.
I also saw this with companies that provide drug testing, background checks, etc. Same thing...viewed as a secure channel.
The odds of someone obtaining credit card information from a plaintext email is a lot higher than someone decoding a VOIP SIP/T38 stream over the public internet, and reading the secrets out of that.
And if its through a traditional carrier (not an Internet provider), its digital, but almost always over their internal network. It is more secure through obscurity alone than plain text email.
I see all sorts of things I shouldn't see when searching the pile of papers on the fax machine at a large company for my fax.
That's not an issue of the security of fax as a transmission method, it's a problem with your company's security at the fax endpoint.
There's also the issue that many fax endpoints that are fax to email gateways. Or fax to non https website gateways.
Edit: Nobody is arguing for using email instead of fax. The argument is to use something better. Like paypal or stripe instead of full cc info + cvv2 on a piece of paper.
When it comes to liability for breaches of confidentiality, yes, it matters very much whether the sender chose an poor channel or the recipient had choose poor practices around what was done with information once it was received.
Nothing is 100% safe. It is just a matter of being safer than the effort the attacker is willing to spend gaining hold of the data (or that it will take so long that the data is no longer worth having).
Also fax is apparently the only way to reserve a table for Oktoberfest in Munich. Or so says a German colleague.
A lot of routine tasks in Japan also require a fax machine.
Also, fax is still used for a lot of financial and legal stuff generally, especially in countries with less developed Internet infrastructure.
Online processes are not yet legal in California.