"e-signatures" are still a touchy subject in business. What can we do to help make them more acceptable and widespread? Is there any precedent that they are equal to a paper signature?
In terms of making it more widespread, it takes some work.
The way we're doing it is by combining e-signatures with other services and doing user education and cross pollination between the services. Our other product is HelloFax, which lets you send and receive faxes online.
But, I think we're getting closer to an inflection point as society is starting to use e-signatures more and more.
Why wouldn't you host those yourself? Aren't there concerns and operational risks involved when using Amazon?
- Neal, co-founder of HelloFax
There are always concerns and risks involved with hosting personal data, but it's not fundamentally different based on cloud hosting compared to colocation (or even managing hardware at your own location). There's mild complexity because 3rd parties are involved, but this is quickly becoming the norm.
Even with native OS drivers, I don't think there's a way to implement this for authentication without the help of an online "profile", which I personally hate because it tends to centralization of data, which in this case is NOT a good idea.
Machine signatures are good enough to make a law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen