Anyone who travels knows the awful
feeling of being out of touch. It’s not so bad if
that’s what you want. Everyone needs to drop out from
time to time, take a break, hang out the ol’ Gone
Fishing sign. But if you’re not just opting out of the
rat race for a few days, that feeling of being disconnected
or having voice messages and faxes piling up is not fun.
People travel on business more than ever now.
The computer mags like to call such travelers "road
warriors," but if you’ve ever been one – gone
somewhere to close a deal, finish an article, sign a
contract, research a book – you’re probably neither
impressed nor charmed by the term. You may be hot and weary.
Frustrated, maybe. Jet-lagged and prone to waking up
wondering where you are and why you ever took this damned
assignment, maybe. But Conan the Road Warrior? Get serious.
Of all the hassles of travel, the
worst may be that sense of disconnection. Have you
ever been in a terminal, still waiting for a call-back from a
critical contact at your destination city when you heard the
gate agent’s voice call out for you to report to the
counter or lose your confirmed seat? It can be a horrendously
frustrating experience. Anyone who travels in the course of
making a living or meeting a deadline can tell such stories.
That’s why we were excited when we heard
about a new and finally "ready for prime time"
service called JFax. There’s no way to control the heat
and crowds and unpredictability of travel, but JFax has taken
a huge step toward eliminating the mistakes and missteps that
follow from not being in touch. They will serve as your
central contact point for voice mail, email and faxes,
serving them up to you in whatever email service you
designate. And they have local numbers in 24 major
metropolitan cities around the world. In effect, the service
gives travelers – or anyone else, for that matter –
the opportunity to have a "virtual office" just
about anywhere in the world. All for $12.50 a month.
That’s less than many
professionals spend on toner for their fax machines in a
month.
Naturally, when we heard JFax had solved its
initial bugs and was ready for serious users, we had to take
a closer look. As frequent travelers, we’ve been waiting
for something like this for years and were hardly likely to
ignore it when it arrived – if it was what we
hoped. That was a big if, given that many services have tried
to do something similar, with 800 number voice mail messaging
and the like. It just has never been done in a manner likely
to be both reliable and useful to travelers. Maybe, we
reasoned, this time someone got it right.
Someone did. What we found convinces us that
anyone who travels for a living, and/or operates a home-based
or small business, should take a closer look at the JFax
service. It can save you serious Exedrin headaches.
How It Works
Here’s how JFax works. As a subscriber,
you will get a true local telephone number in any of 24 major
metropolitan cities around the world. There are no extra pin
numbers or the like, as with so many 800-number voice mail
services. Just a local phone number for which you pay a flat
$12.50 monthly fee. Of course you can sign up for more than
one, or for numbers in various different cities, if you need
to. New cities are being added frequently, according to the
company.
On each number, you create your own, custom
outgoing messages for callers to hear, and you can receive
unlimited voice mail and faxes at that number. While you
can’t use the numbers to make what would amount to local
phone calls from the remote "local numbers," it
hardly matters. The point is that callers have a
"real" number where they can leave messages or send
faxes. All incoming calls are then converted to standardized
fax or voice mail file formats and sent on to whatever email
address you specify, for you to pick up at your convenience
with a PC or Mac.
In effect, these phone numbers give
you a virtual presence in the cities where they are located.
If you want to be present, in a communications sense, in San
Francisco, say, or New York, Beverly Hills or any of the
other JFax cities, just sign up for a number there. Put it on
your business cards, letterhead and World Wide Web page.
People will be able to call you there and leave voice
messages or send faxes.
When you pick up your email, voice mail
recordings arrive as sound files that you hear through your
computer’s speakers, much as you would listen to a tape
recording. With faxes, you can view them directly on-screen
or print them out like any other file. They emerge from a
laser printer looking better than the old-style special paper
roll faxes did, since they are equivalent to a plain-paper
fax.
JFax is not just useful in North America,
though at present that is where it has established most of
its centers. The system also has centers in a variety of
international cities. Major international metro areas include
London, Paris, Amsterdam, Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. US
cities with one or more area codes include New York, Los
Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, Beverly
Hills, Silicon Valley, and (in the US) toll-free 800 numbers.
The 800 numbers entail an extra $.25 charge, however.
The increasingly international
character of the JFax system gives those who do business
across national borders as well as those who do
transcontinental business in North America an excellent way
to reduce otherwise expensive communication charges. After
all, once a fax or a voice message is saved as a file, it
becomes email, and email is effectively free. (See the
sidebar for a discussion of email forwarding and other
services that you can combine with JFax for expanded
effectiveness.)
Given a JFax account, instead of going to the
trouble and expense of retrieving voice mail by long distance
from your hotel or having faxes forwarded to your hotel at up
to $5 a page, you simply collect them together with your
other messages, from whatever email service you use. You can
check your email from anywhere in the world and listen to
your voice mail messages for the cost of a local call. Using
your laptop you can view, annotate and reply to faxes or
forward them to others using JFax (for a nominal extra
charge). Then you can listen to voice messages through your
laptop’s speakers and, while you’re at it, process
your other email. And you do it all in a single sitting,
though the common JFax/email interface.
This system can be a huge boon to
professional travelers.
Some Requirements
Okay…there is what some people
might consider a catch. The JFax service does require that
you have an email account somewhere and you do need a
computer or notebook PC with which to log on and check your
mail. But email has become such an established fact of
business life these days that most people would hardly
consider that a catch. Many people would not try to do
business nowadays without the benefits of near-instantaneous
communication by email anyway. In that sense, needing email
is no more a catch than needing a first class postage stamp
was in earlier days. It’s just a fact of life.
According to recent figures, more than 70
million people now use email. There are free email accounts
like Juno for skinflints who won’t or can’t pony up
the average cost of $20 or so a month that it costs for
unlimited email and Internet access. Even if your only access
to the World Wide Web is through, say, a computer at a public
library, you can maintain internet-based email as your
reception terminus for a remote JFax phone number.
For those who simply do not want
email or do not want to take the time to learn how to use it,
we can hold out some dim hope. Sometime in the next 25 years,
someone may invent a time machine that will return them to
those golden days when a 5-cent stamp would get one’s
messages across town or across the country in a few days. Ben
Franklin was justifiably proud of the postal service he set
up, and it served the US well for 200 years or so. Earlier in
this century, for those in a hurry, there was always
expensive, operator-assisted long distance calling. With a
time machine, you might manage to get back to those halcyon
days. Personally, we prefer to get our mail right after
someone sends it, and email is how you do that. We also
prefer to know our messages are being delivered right after
we hit the "send" button. There’s nothing like
a hard deadline to make you appreciate the immediacy of
email.
About the Company
JFax (reachable on the Web at http://www.JFax.com) was
established in December 1995, the brainchild of a
24-year-old, highly successful German rap musician named Jaye
Muller who got increasingly annoyed at the communication
hassles hotels created for him when we was on the road. In
creating JFax, he wanted to provide simplified, cost
efficient, location-independent, worldwide communications at
a reasonable cost. What that has to do with German rap music
we’re not sure, but the connection with being on the
road and out of touch will be clear to any traveler.
Muller’s idea was a good one.
In an interview at Il Fornaio Italian
Restaurant in Beverly Hills, California, Muller explained
how his company’s proprietary technology renders fax
machines, telephone answering machines, and other voicemail
systems near obsolete – at least for those of the 70
million people with email addresses who need to receive their
voice mail, email and faxes from any location. Muller, who
studied technology in college before becoming a musician,
clearly believes in the value of the service he has created.
Long active in promoting human rights, he gives the
impression he has always set out to achieve anything he felt
was worth doing and has usually succeeded. The success of the
JFax probably comes as no surprise to him.
Additional Details
Here are some additional details on how the
system works. The $12.50 base monthly charge secures a
personal telephone number in any of the system’s 24
currently active area codes (see list at end of article).
These cover most major US and several international cities.
The base charge covers all calls, no matter how many. JFax
also offers 800 number access (again, these are
"real" individual numbers without "pin
numbers" required after dialing) for a base charge of
$12.50 monthly, plus a surcharge of $.25 per message or fax
page. JFax also will send out faxes for about $.05 per page,
using their proprietary software. A nickel a page is almost
negligible compared to a standard hotel faxing charge of
$1-$5 a page.
The advantage of using JFax for sending faxes
is that they will reach standard fax machines. If you would
rather send faxes directly , you can export the proprietary JFX-format fax image into a standard TIF file, manipulate it
or translate it to other formats with software of your own,
and send it out as a fax using standard fax programs such as
WinFax or even the Window95 "Inbox" utility. We
prefer the convenience of direct JFax transmission,
especially given how inexpensive it is to use the service.
Your Jfax subscriber phone number
remains yours alone for as long as you keep the account. You
can safely put it on business cards and stationery, list it
in the yellow pages, include it in ads, and so forth. Having
a single number for voice mail and faxes can simplify your
business cards and stationery but if you want a "big
company" image on a small office or home office budget,
you could get two numbers, one for for faxes and the other
for voice.
Many JFax customers do use the service to
enhance the image of their home-based businesses. A small
business with "virtual offices" in remote cities
around the world can project a feeling of good, solid
confidence. Since there are no associated staffing or
facility costs, the enhancement is very affordable using JFax. Image may not be everything in business, but it does
count for a lot after all.
Here’s an example. One of this
article’s authors operates primarily from a small office
in a suburb of Los Angles but has clients and professional
contacts in a wide range of cities. Jet Fax now gives him
"virtual offices" in New York, Los Angeles, Beverly
Hills, Chicago, Atlanta, Paris and London. As his business
grows, he expects so too will the number of his local JFax
phone numbers. The $12.50 monthly charge for each number
often pays for itself many times over in the course of a
month.
But it is for travelers that JFax is most
invaluable. With a notebook PC and an email account at MSN,
Netcom, AOL, CompuServe, or any other online system with an
international presence, you will be able to check email at
any time of day from anyplace in the world where you can
connect to the Internet. When satellite-based Personal
Communications Service (PCS) gets established over the course
of the coming year or two, you’ll be able to check for
mail and messages from the peak of Mt. Everest or the deck of
a lone-hand sailboat in the middle of an ocean, if
that’s your style.
We’ll leave it to the
philosophers to decide whether that’s a good or a bad
thing. For ourselves – speaking as people who travel a
lot… we love it.
– Nick
Anis and Craig
Menefee
