Business 2.0

The last week few weeks I was on vacation and problems arose with a few of the local movie theaters websites that I manage. The theaters inform me of changes to movie times, etc, by fax. Faxing is a antiquated technology I wish would just roll over and die. Anything faxing can do, email can do 100 times better. Regardless of the future impending doom I wish to see happen to the fax technology, it's still a necessity in my website updating life.

Up until today, I've used a free version of efax. The free version would allow a certain number of pages(I think 20) per month faxed to me at a non-local fax number. The faxes would then be sent to me via email as a file type only accessible through their efax software.  I even had 2 efax accounts to spred the faxing quota between different movie theaters.

It's worked fairly well until recently. Due to special show times during the christmas holidays I maxed out my monthly quota of pages in one week. Plus the straw that broke the camels back, when I was able to get a few unprotected wifi bars on my iphone in Big Bear, the faxes that contained crucial information was not accessible to me as I didn't have the efax software loaded.

So I weighed the pros and cons and realized that since this is such a crucial part of me being able to give my customers the customer service they deserve, I signed up for a faxing service by RingCentral for $7.99/month. It's a local number and they send the faxes to my email via a pdf which I can access anywhere on any computer. Plus now I get 300 pages a month so I'll never run out of fax pages.

With this purchase I've moved another step closer to being able to handle my business from anywhere, vacation or home, at anytime.

All the "Business 2.0" services I use and can access from any computer, anytime:

• Mint.com to manage my finances, bugeting and account balances (FREE)
  
• San Diego Credit Union online bill pay, I never have to write checks (FREE)
  
• BlinkSale.com to manage my invoices for services and products (Subscription)
  
• RingCentral.com for pdf online faxes (Subscription)
  
• Google Docs to manage and host my letters and various documents (FREE)
  
• Gmail For Domains for free email with the best spam filtering (FREE)
  
• Blogger.com for personal/business website information updates (FREE)
  
• WebHost4Life for website hosting (Subscription)
  
• ConstantContact.com for newsletter and subscriber management (Subscription)
  
• flickr.com pro account for image and photograph hosting (Subscription)