I came across a service called Celery that offers “computer free emailing.” It’s aimed at the computer illiterate who want to be able to send and receive emails.
Essentially it’s an extremely expensive fax service. Your friends and family email Celery who then faxes those emails to you. If you want to reply, you fax it back and Celery will email it to the recipient.
I guess there could be a market for some people, but the price seems outrageous to me. What’s the consensus: Rip-off or valuable service?!
Well, my +60 yr. old aunts and uncles own computers, but don’t use email much. They have faxes. I even know several medium businesses (and lawyers) that won’t do biz by email but will by fax.
Sheesh, maybe I missed my big opportunity. Now hiring coders to replicate this and cut their prices by 1/2 !!
What a crock. Crikey!©
Enabling stubborn technophobic idiots, a tiny and rapidly dwindling market. Nothing like jumping on on the down side of the growth curve. All that’ll be left this time next year will be the logo in the window next to a sign “Commercial space for lease.”
2, Nothing like taking advantage of people with lots of money (read pre-boomer) that are technophobes. A dwindling market?
Is the boomer generation growing old? Does your 70 year old dad use email? If he’s still in business (even farming), I’ll bet he has a fax — my 80 year old dad does.
Since I don’t know your demographic (or whether or not you’re rich) , you missed the point, entirely !! I guarantee I’ve seen folks over 60, and a lot of businesses like lawyers and doctors that won’t do business by ‘net or email, only by fax. If this a cheap way to email ’em, why not? MAC OSX, Vista or XP don’t have any built-in email to fax software of which I’m aware. If they do please correct me. Is there some open source freeware that could do this? Let us know.
Just like celery in the ground, it could grow.
3, It appears I’m a cowboy, I can’t even modify a previous post. Jeez. The sentence was intended:
Since I don’t know your demographic …
you’veI’ve missed the point….Damn posting software!!
Doesn’t Faxaway or eFax offer the same service? At much cheaper prices.
I used to use those services a lot but so many people have email now that if I need to “fax” them something, I just scan it into a PDF file and email it.
But either are super-great services if you have international offices and are so much cheaper than faxing with regular phone calls.
While I appreciate where you’re coming from, the fact remains that people on the far end of their life cycle aren’t going to be with us all that much longer. It doesn’t do much for growing a business when, as you’re trying to add customers, the ones you already have are steadily, relentlessly joining the celery in it’s native habitat, i.e., the ground…
But there are also other reasons why many of these people haven’t joined the computer revolution, and that’s because a lot of them are tightwads. And good luck trying to persuade them to pay nearly as much as what most ISPs cost for just that one part of what internets service provide…
Maybe I’m wrong, but I see receivership in their near future. Let’s meet back here a year from now and see how it went.
Celery works great for stirring your Bloody Mary or throwing at the opposing team, but I suspect those are the limits of its utility. 🙂
WOO HOO
It happened again… That’s twice in a year so far!
I fully agree with Lauren. My philosophy is pretty simple… If you don’t have email, why in the Hell would I even consider doing business with your backward ass Flintstone business?
Faxes are archaic, clumsey, and borderline Amish.
Well my 86 year old grandmother has a computer and we email each other weekly. She takes digital pictures, edits and resizes them and then sends them to me as a PDF slide show. But not everyone is comfortable with technology so there is a place for easy-to-use products like this, but not at this price!
Here is another product aimed at the technology impaired:
http://www.jitterbug.com/Easy-Cell-Phones/simple-cell-phones.html
Why not a surfing the web with you fax machine?! There must be at least one dumb greedy venture capitalist who is more than willing to put up a couple of millions into that idea.
In the 90s I was with a company that provided a centralized fax, voice and Internet storage and retrieval service for information. Most of these organization’s previous methodology required an army of interns and a Fed-X budget that would feed a small third world country. As it became more obvious (to everyone except faxphiles) that the Internet would for the most part replace faxing, we made an effort to wean customers off the fax segment of the service. One of the reasons was maintaining the fax side cost roughly triple that of the Internet side. VoIP and FoIP wasn’t what is it today. Dialogic boards, Brooktrout boards, channel banks and the, always a bargain, addition of local numbers on T1s made providing the fax service a major pain in the budget. Well, the Faxies didn’t see it that way. We raised the price of the fax service thinking that would move users off faxing, they bitched and continued to use it. We raised the price again, they bitched louder and continued to use it. You say, “well that’s dumb”. Sure, but these were the same folks who called our tech support lines befuddled over not being able to load rolls of thermal fax paper on their plain paper fax machines. We sold the business a few years later, but in talking to the new owners over the years, I always ask, “still doing the Fax thing?”. The answer is still, “yes, damn-it, it won’t go away”. So I’m not surprised this service is around and over priced.
It does seem like a rip off, but really it’s not that bad, I just bought that same printer/fax for about $80, they sell it for $120, that’s not too bad. And then the service is really $140 a year, which is cheaper then efax. I wouldn’t get it myself but it’s too really that bad of deal when you check out the site and do the real math.
I still contend that doctors and lawyers will not conduct biz via email — for some arcane reason they’ll use only fax. Perhaps the paper trail is required by law. But I see both sides of the argument. I’d still like to send my aunt a picture of my new grand-niece without snail mail. The snail mail can wait until the kid looks a little better 🙂
12 – You’re right, and there may be legal reasons to believe that if it ain’t on paper, it ain’t real. But nowadays even real estate contracts are signed and sent by fax (including scan-and-send email) with snail mail backups. for the recording side.
Greg Allen (5) is probably also right. People who travel a lot and have to send legal documentation back and forth might find this service useful.
You can get it free (with limitations):
http://www.savetz.com/fax/free_fax.php
I used tpc.int (free) for years. Coverage was about half of the world. Haven’t had to send a fax for so long now, though….
Or my own ISP allows users to forward an email to a local fax number, for no extra charge over the $cdn4.95 per month fee.
I use efax for the *opposite*. Somebody sends a fax, and efax turns it into a graphic email. It’s great–and free. Just that it has been a long time since anybody has faxed me anything!
It sounds stupid to me, too.
But, OTOH, when was the last time you worried about getting a virus from opening a fax?
I can state personally that the legal profession still greatly relies upon faxes, primarly because you need signed copies of things and the one-stop at the fax machine is simpler than the sign-scan-email combination in most offices. Plus there is sheer inertia. People keep doing things because that is the way they always did it.
What every happened to the Mail Station?
First, a comment about the price. The service is $139.00 per year for color service, or $99/year for black & white. People can purchase a device from us for $120.00, so the total package is $259.00 first year assuming you purchase both a device and color service from us.
Second, there are 55mm adults in America who aren’t online. It’s hard to believe but it’s true. 30mm of them are seniors. Their world is the TV, telephone and newspaper. We developed a way for them to communicate with their families via email in a very simple way.
100% of households have televisions, 86% DVD players but only 76% of households have computers, and 18% of those aren’t being used.
We are different than the fax service providers because they turn computers into fax machines, we turn fax machines into email devices. We have significant telephone charges that’s why the maximum sends & receives number is what it is. Further, our customers sends and receives, on average, mirrors that number.
We made the product gift priced. Boomer aged children are buying it for their parents mainly. Sorry for the long post, but our customers love the thing.
Thank you.
18 Andrew — you’re right, and I wish I had a piece of that biz. Boomer relatives, lawyers, doctors, etc. They all have and use a darn fax. It won’t go away anytime soon. Wonder about the growth, however.
Just another 2 new gold coins worth…
Well, it’s good to have faith in one’s product…
$25 a month doesn’t sound too bad for someone who doesn’t want to pay for dialup or broadband, or deal with computer hassles. No spam, no viruses, no calls to tech support, no visits from GeekSquad or whatever, etc. Some people might find the convenience well worthwhile.
Try MyFax.com for $10 a month, up to $100 faxes-You email their fax number @myfax.com& they receive your page(s). You get an 800 number to get faxes back via email!
Thanks BubbaRay.
If you take a look at how my own mother (who hates computers) sends an email, she simply handwrites “Andrew” at the top of the page. Then presses 2 buttons. Or, she can write “family”, and that will send out 25 emails simultaneously. Dan, you can’t do that with the fax services companies. I can’t see my 79 year old mother punching in 23 telephone numbers and sending the same piece of mail 23 times. Writing “family” at the top of the page is a lot simpler.
We married my mother’s world (handwriting, tv, phone & newspapers) with ours – PDA, laptop, cell phone.
What’s cool is that our customers never use the term “email”, because they know that Celery invented something for them, and they are right. So, they use the term “I received a Celery”, “I sent a Celery”… BTW, the cost is technically $8.25/month for black & white service or $11.58/mo for color service. We sell the color fax machine ($120) to make it simple for the person who lives in Cleveland to purchase it for their parent in Florida.
Thanks all, we realized that we need to do a better job of explaining our pricing ; )
23, Andrew, I tried to email my lawyer (of 20 years) last week and still haven’t gotten a reply. Was giving him a new assignment for real cash. He hasn’t replied yet. Going through the telephone is so painful — he’s in a meeting, he’s out of town, he’s at lunch, let me take a message, etc. And if I do get through after 10 minutes of wasting my time, he says, “well, why didn’t you just send me a fax?” Good grief.
Good luck to you.