MongoNet, backed by Adobe founders, introduces new consumer fax-to-PDF email service charged on a per-page basis.This week, MongoNet introduced MongoScan, a consumer version of its enterprise MongoFax service. Customers fax documents to MongoNet, who in turn email PDF versions to recipients with what it calls "email cover sheets."
MongoNet’s new twist on the fax-to-PDF service is that the company doesn’t require senders to enter a fax number for the recipient, which is required by competing services such as MaxEmail. Instead, MongoNet's fax center acts as a gateway between the world's fax machines and its email network.
For a quarter a page, MongoScan does what market data shows a lot of small business owners either can't figure out or don't have time to do, says MongoNet CEO Matt Henry: Configure their multifunction printer's document scanning features.
"We're not really in the faxing business; we're in the branded PDF scanning business," says Henry, who adds that his company recently broke the one-million-user mark. "We just happen to leverage the railroad tracks laid over the last 30 years. We're putting that scanning functionality into the world's fax network."
To Henry, the Internet is the "biggest distributed printing machine ever created," a global paper-waster. His company is in the business of making money, of course, like all businesses. But it's also helping customers reduce paper consumption by turning faxes into PDFs. Furthermore, he says, some of his customers use MongoNet in lieu of FedEx and UPS overnight couriers, which further reduces a document's carbon footprint.
While "dinosaurs who still use faxes" might sound like a niche market, it's a pretty big niche—expanding government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley are actually increasing the amount of required paperwork in corporate America, and paperwork is also multiplying in the legal and real-estate sectors, he says.
People haven't yet cottoned to the various digital-signature technologies, or, as Henry jokes, purchased retinal scanners to authenticate their documents. Either way, it makes hand-signed documents represent a good share of the 650 billion pages emanating from billions of machines operating internationally Henry says, citing IDC data. Americans, he adds, account for a third of that traffic despite the country’s considerable Internet communications infrastructure—and market research shows that fax traffic is on the rise, not dwindling.
PDF remains the only viable choice for digital conversion of fax output, Henry says. MongoNet has customized a few installations of its enterprise service to create TIFF files from paper faxes for legacy transaction-management systems, but PDF is the only document format the overwhelming majority of the company’s customers want. Microsoft's XPS format, Henry says, is not yet even on his radar for support.
"[PDF is] page-oriented, and there are so many neat things you can do with it... For us, it was the clear choice after we surveyed businesses and our engineering friends," Henry says. "Our average page is around 25KB; that's not very much."
MongoNet has gotten financial backing from the likes of Charles Schwab and a list of Bay-area financial A-listers. A Silicon Valley software developer, Henry knew Adobe founders Charles Geschke and John Warnock before he'd launched MongoNet, he says, and the two signed on as investors in the company during its recent third round of funding.
Document Management 
