A lot of the Uber-for-food-delivery startups use them for ordering at restaurants because there is no text-based API to restaurants and the UX of receiving an automated phone call is poor.

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.

To explain the typical workflow here, the restaurant receives a fax from the marketplace with a phone number to call to acknowledge the delivery. There is a short numeric code on the fax print out that the restaurant types into the IVR system.

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.

Depends on the company, but this is the gist of it. There are frequently options outside of fax, as well. It's one of several.

For years the operating procedure for Seamless/Grubhub/Delivery.com orders was a form that would be faxed to a restaurant, the restaurant would communicate that order to the kitchen (either by it's own POS system, writing the order on a regular order ticket or even giving the kitchen the fax sheet) and then the service would call the restaurant and the employee would enter the confirmation code into the phone.

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.

Kitchens are still a rough place for technology, and even though the latest iPhone might survive a drop in the toilet, I don't want to drink the soup after a phone's taken a swim in it.

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.

AFAIK HotelTonight also use faxes for every booking, as do almost every other booking site. Mainly due to the same issue: all hotels use different systems.

My understanding is that holding a fax copy of a contract with a signature is as good in court as holding the contract itself.

But holding a PDF of same is not.

TradeHarbor offers a service called EmailToSign [1] that allows you to sign PDFs using your voice. [1] http://tradeharbor.com/2017/hosted-apps/

Electronic signing is a thing however. Faxes are successful because they are the technology "lowest common denominator" for business

I was under the impression that HelloFax/HelloSign basically did this -- they would let you digitally sign the document, and then fax it out to someone (possibly yourself).

> food-delivery

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?

The short answer is 'yes' — fax machines are actually a pretty great solution to this problem. If you think about it, there isn't really that much overhead for having a fax line and a $40 fax machine vs running a full computer + printer combo, set up is trivial, faxes have a very well-understood track record, and the 'sender' gets direct feedback on whether or not the physical document was successfully delivered.

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.

I'm not looking for startup ideas in this domain, I was just wondering "in general". If the PC + printer is already there (surely it has to be for accounting, etc.) why have a fax.

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.

A lot of these restaurants _do_ have a PC + printer in a back room or office somewhere. If the restaurant is owned by a group (or small chain), that setup may only exist at one location.

They can (and do!) put the fax machine right by the kitchen.

What would your software run on? A PC? Who is going to keep it up and running, make sure it is connected to the Internet, etc.

It requires a lot less employee training to maintain and operate a fax machine. Can you build a better mousetrap?

I would have thought the PC was already there -- but maybe not in the right place.

Email-to-printer is a built-in feature on many high-end printers already (HP calls it ePrint), and it's easy enough to glue together some software (fetchmail --python/whatever glue--> cups) and package it up as a distro for the raspberry pi 3 (with its built-in wifi and regular usb ports). Plug Twilio in and now the system can also receive faxes.

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.

Exactly. I used phaxio with a group-ordering side project I built a while back, there really was no better option for getting/confirming orders to restaurants reliably. Love that Twilio is doing this (even though I'm out of the food-delivery business!).

Two years ago I had to work on integrating a SaaS product with fax. The client was a large financial organization who had a contract with a counterparty. Under this contract, they had to give notice to each other of a certain action and the contract stipulated the message was sent by fax. It was easier to implement fax than get lawyers involved in redrafting the contract.

Lawyers like faxes because it leaves a legally acknowledged written record on both sides, and they're instantaneous.

So they send a lot of them.

For some reason the fax is legally sounder than email.

I think a faxed signature counts as a "wet" signature. Also it's easier to sign then feed into a fax machine than:

- 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

That's why we have DocuSign!

"Wet signature" being a term with some legal standing. DocuSign, not so much, other than for preliminary real estate actions.

Could you elaborate on the "not so much"? A lot of companies (including law firms and Fortune 100 corps) have had me sign documents with DocuSign/HelloSign with no reservation. What would be the potential legal differences compared to an actual signature?

I'm working on the California death certificate automation system. DocuSign is not legally accepted for a doctor to sign off on cause of death for a decedent.

Laws for your use case will be different. That's mine.

47 states (New York, Washington and Illinois the outliers) have passed an Uniform Electronic Transaction Act that confers electronic signatures with equal weight. A federal law has existed since 2000. Unfortunately a self-fulfilling prophecy of people not accepting the validity of electronic agreements because no one else does has kept usage low. Even faxed contracts are often followed up with Fedex delivered versions. The only electronic agreement I've done is FAFSA's PIN blessed submission. The recent high profile payment card breaches and politician email doxxing have further decreased public confidence in all things computerized.

> 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.

Still used when placing order with a number of manufacturers, unfortunately.

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.

> They are viewed as "safe" for credit card information, as opposed to emails.

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.

Yes. I'm not skeptical that fax is safer than email. I'm skeptical that it's safe.

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.

> Yes. I'm not skeptical that fax is safer than email. I'm skeptical that it's safe.

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).

The context is that companies that continue to push fax could, and should, do something better. The manufacturers I mentioned, for example, could implement paypal or stripe payments with very little effort. Aside from security issues (fax to email gateways, cc info sitting on a shared fax machine for everyone to see), it would reduce costs.

> 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.

Does it matter? The point is that fax isn't inherently a great idea for confidential info.

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.

> Does it matter?

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.

Japan, for one, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fa...

And Germany.

Also fax is apparently the only way to reserve a table for Oktoberfest in Munich. Or so says a German colleague.

Faxes seem to be in use at places where there is an established system/bureaucracy. We use them regularly in aviation because our suppliers/customers/service providers require them for some reason. Medical offices use them to adhere to HIPAA requirements. The government and large corporations use them because it was how the system was developed at some point and they haven't gotten around to changing it yet. (UPS, for example, can't resend us certain invoices via e-mail, only fax. I have no clue why.)

Anything that is legally mandated to not go over the "American Internet" (for example, Canadian health care records).

A lot of routine tasks in Japan also require a fax machine.

Very widely used in health care and insurance industries.

Booking.com uses it alot. They have a MASSIVE fax system for servicing European hotels because many of them (generally smaller ones) aren't connected in any meaningful way. So when Booking.com makes a reservation they fax confirmation details to the Hotel. The hotel can also make modifications by faxing details back

I've had to use fax to verify my identity in NYC when setting up a Con Edison account (electricity). I had no way of sending a fax physically so resorted to using some shit online service that tricked me and kept charging me every month after sending the original single page I needed. Horrible experience.

At one point, I heard Apple used to require you to fax a certified copy of legal documents relating to your company in order to open an App Store developer account.

Also, fax is still used for a lot of financial and legal stuff generally, especially in countries with less developed Internet infrastructure.

A lot of hotels still receive booking confirmations via fax, if they aren't receiving it via email.

I've worked at a company, targeting medical practices, where fax was/is by a very effective method of marketing.

While this is changing rapidly to tablets, many Grubhub/Seamless restaurants receive delivery orders through fax.

Doctor sign-off on cause of death, as well as other medical related stuff.

Online processes are not yet legal in California.

Health care and dental care providers tend to still like faxes. It's still a thing, unfortunately.

Between hospitals, for instance when patient data is requested.

manufacturing orders, sadly