Saturday, May 03, 2008

Cool Tool: drop.io

I found a very cool site called drop.io through Lifehacker this morning, just when I needed it. I needed to send a fax yesterday, but I was at home and I don't have a fax machine. I have a modem for my computer upstairs, but it's not connected to the phone line (it may not even be physically installed anymore), and I don't know if I have any fax software. I did a quick google search on free email-to-fax services, and found very little, so I was planning on waiting until Monday and just sending it from work. And then I read a posting on Lifehacker called "drop.io Adds Free, Simple Faxing". I checked it out, and it's just what I need.

There is no registration and they don't ask for your email address. You just create a "drop" and you can add files to the drop by uploading them, emailing them, or faxing them (you print off a special cover page and make that the first page of the fax, then fax it to drop.io and they figure out which drop it's for and add a pdf to that drop). Once you've got a drop, you can email it or fax it out, or you can give the address to other people and they can see the files from there. It's private in that there is no directory of drops anywhere and no way to search, so to get to the drop, you have to know the name of it.

There are no fees for any of this (though you can upgrade for $10 to get 1 GB of storage, otherwise each drop is limited to 100 MB), and no advertising on the web site, so I'm not sure how they make any money at this, but it's very slick.

No comments: