Why We Need Web-Based Electronic Signatures

This may sound strange coming from an electronic signature vendor, but one thing is clear: no one needs to use e-signatures.

Business today does manage to operate, credit-crunch aside, with some success using fax, FedEx, snail mail, and the like.  Global commerce existed before the internet, and contracts have been signed quite successfully using good old pen and paper for quite some time.

So why change?  A simple reason.  To make signing (and closing your customers) 10x better.  10x easier.  10x faster.  10x simpler. 10x more elegent.

Anything less than 10x -- there's no reason to change.

• Bringing down signing times from > 1 week to 42 minutes = 10x better. 
• Sending a document for signing in 5 clicks = 10x better.
• Signing on a Blackberry, rather than trying to find a POTS fax machine somewhere = 100x better.

And what about scanning in your signature and using that?  Well, E-SIGN issues aside, you could.  But how does your customer do that?  Do you buy them a scanner?  FedEx it to them?  That's not 10x better.

On that note, we found this post on how to "Create Your Own Electronic Signature" demonstrative.  You could do this ... but why would you?  

"Create your own electronic signature [Using Flex and Cold Fusion]
In an enhanced example of a technique that works well - combining an AS 3 PNG encoder, an open-source utility, the Apache Batik project, and of course, ColdFusion 8, you can create your very own electronic signature.
The electronic signature you create, by dragging your mouse across the signature canvas to, in effect, sign your 'John Hancock', works like this:

• The signature drawing is passed as binary data to a ColdFusion CFC function that saves the PNG to the ColdFusion server's file system.
• Next, leveraging an open source tool, KVEC, the PNG, created in step one, is passed to another CFC function that converts the PNG to a SVG file.
• Next, the SVG is passed to a CFC function that completes the final conversion to a PDF file, using the Apache Batik project's batik-rasterizer.jar.
• Next, leveraging the ColdFusion 8 <cfzip> tag, a CFC function creates a zip archive of the PNG, the SVG, and the PDF files of the signature just created.
• Finally, to save on disk space, a final CFC function is called to delete the PNG and SVG files (once the PDF and zip archive are safely created)." 

Electronic signatures, and electronic contracting, as a web service can make your close process 10x better.  For you, your customer, your colleagues, you boss, your team.  That's why you go digital, when analog still works.