Many industry pundits say the fax is a dying technology, thanks to PDF. Yet paper pervades offices in record volumes, and the typical office dweller could use an easier way to turn paper into PDF than find the closest scanner, save the scanned file as a PDF and whatever else has to happen (open an e-mail program, attach the scanned file, etc.)

Enter E-mate, a company that has announced two U.S. patents (view one of them, 6,693,729, here) it received for a new “adapter device” that turns fax scans into PDFs and directly e-mails them to whatever address the person faxing the document specifies--without a computer.

"There are only three known ways to send a hardcopy document directly to an e-mail address--scanning the document and attaching to an e-mail message, sending via an e-mail-capable multifunction machine or using the E-mate technology," says Mark Bloomfield, inventor and founder of E-mate. "E-mate is much less expensive and easier to use than the other two alternatives. E-mate features can be added to any of the existing worldwide installed base of fax machines as well as can be embedded into newly manufactured machines, making this technology broad-based and very valuable."