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THE MESSENGER
How German Rap star Jaye Muller
solved a business-travel problem
Clive Thompson
Friday, May 28, 1999
Jaye Muller, a popular East German musician, was having some problems during his 1994 tour. It wasn't low album sales or thin audiences. On the contrary, Muller's rap record--a hard-edged, jubilant attack on right-wing German politics--was doing quite well. His problem was more mundane, and familiar to any travelling businessperson: Muller was having trouble getting his voice mail and faxes.
"When you're on tour, you're travelling from city to city every day," Muller explains. "You're staying in a different hotel, sometimes every night." Whenever someone tried to fax him or leave a voice-mail message, he'd usually be long gone, off to another screaming crowd in another town. The only tool Muller could rely on unquestionably was his E-mail via his laptop; each night, he'd dial into his CompuServe on-line service and find it waiting.
One night, a light bulb went off in his head. E-mail is perfect for road warriors, he realized, because it's quintessentially non-geographic. "Your E-mail address never moves anywhere," says the 27-year-old Muller. "It's always there to receive messages." What if he could create a system that could deal with faxes and voice mail in the same way?
In under a year, Muller founded a company to do just that: JFAX. With a $2-million investment in 1996 from two industrialists, one in South Africa and one in the United Kingdom, Muller--who trained in electronics as a teenager--designed software and hardware that would roll E-mail, voice mail and faxing into one elegant service. It works like this: You sign up for a personal JFAX phone number, in any of several dozen countries. Anyone who wants to contact you can call the number to leave a voice message or send a fax. Then, JFAX E-mails the fax to you as a graphical attachment, or the voice mail as a tiny audio file. Thus, anywhere you can retrieve your E-mail, voice mail and faxes can follow. Soon after its launch, Muller's service added even more bells and whistles. Subscribers could also send faxes by E-mail, greatly reducing long-distance costs. And if they were on the road and couldn't get to a computer, they could check their E-mail by phone--with a monotone computerized voice in the JFAX service reading out each message, in full Star-Trek styling.
Almost singlehandedly, Muller found he'd created a new industry--"unified messaging." In the past year, it's become one of the hottest technology horseraces around. According to a study by the Framingham, Mass.-based technology research firm IDC, there are more than 100,000 users today of similar unified-messaging services, with 13 million projected for the year 2005. And there are more than a dozen companies jockeying for a slice of the pie, ranging from Muller's JFAX to competitors such as Menlo Park, Calif.'s eFax, and Canada's upcoming FaxPC service. (JFAX doesn't give out figures on its user base, but eFax claimed more than 100,000 sign-ups in its first month of operation.)
Faced with that kind of demand, last summer Sun Microsystems Inc. and Lucent Technologies joined forces to work on unified-messaging software and hardware to sell to telephone companies and Internet service providers; the first of their products is being launched this spring. "The distinctions in how we access E-mail and voice mail are going to go away," Sun strategic marketing manager Peter Schein predicts.
It's not hard to understand the success. Work has become increasingly transnational, at the exact moment that an increasing number of people are plunging (or being shoved, depending on how you look at it) into the shark tank of self-employment. In this context, a unified-messaging service not only allows for seamless travel, but can assist bathrobe-clad garage entrepreneurs in the crucial task of faking corporate legitimacy. "The SOHO [small office/home office] market will be all over this," says Jeannette Noyes, a research analyst at IDC.
What's interesting about unified messaging, though, is that even while it highlights the portability of digital data (such as E-mail), it doesn't deny the central importance of the paper document. This is wise; paper hasn't gone away. (On the contrary--the "paperless office" is, these days, a punch line no longer in need of a joke.) And good old-fashioned faxing is still the backbone of business communications, as I am reminded by Maury Kauffman, a full-time fax consultant. More than 99% of all mid- to large-sized businesses use faxes; faxing last year alone represented a $103-billion global business, including long-distance charges, transmitting a staggering 500 billion pages a year. As a result, "Unified messaging will stand or fall based on how well it integrates faxing," Kauffman says. "It's off to a pretty good start."
Nonetheless, unified messaging still has kinks to work out. Services are wildly divergent. eFax only offers fax-to-E-mail, forgoing voice mail. However, its service is free (it makes its money by selling advertising), while JFAX charges $12.50 (U.S.) a month for its basic package. Meanwhile, Vancouver-based FaxPC, whose service starts up this summer, touts its ability to notify you by cellphone or pager when an E-mail-fax arrives; it will even read the opening lines of the fax. "Our focus is on reaching the seriously mobile user," boasts Stephen Swift, president of Vancouver-based Image Power Inc., an image-compression technology company that runs FaxPC. Like the fragmented PCS phone market, you almost wish they'd all get together and compile the best of their innovations, instead of forcing you to pick.
Moreover, the tricks offered sometimes overreach themselves. JFAX's E-mail-by-phone, for example, can be difficult to understand--the electronic voice reading out your E-mail sounds as if it's suffering from a massive head injury. "Maayyyl froom Gregggg Siwellll," it drawled recently, when my friend Greg Sewell E-mailed me. (On the upside, the voice can be fascinating to listen to, if only because, as with the infamously hallucinogenic handwriting-recognition of Apple's Newton, its errors can veer into the realm of unintentional machine poetry.)
But I quibble. In the much-ballyhooed race for "convergence" products, unified messaging is a paradigm that makes sense. It's also a natural to expand and grow: JFAX plans to build in pager and cellphone message delivery, as those devices increase in memory. Muller, in fact, will be needing his own service when he hits the road this fall to promote his new album. "I've been away from music too long," he muses, reminding me of his central epiphany: In the modern world of transnational work, the technological needs of the average businessperson are weirdly similar to those of an itinerant rap star.
Clive Thompson can be reached via E-mail at clive@bway.net
THE BARGAIN PDA
Many have slavered over a PDA--that's personal digital assistant, for you proles in the back row--but balked at the price. (A fully loaded Palm III runs about $500.)
To seize the cheapskate market, Royal Consumer Business Products has issued the daVinci, a low-end PDA for a mere $100 (U.S.). The cons: bad screen glare, only 256K of memory, and no massive library of shareware, like the one serving the Palm line. The pros: it will still hold thousands of contacts, lists and to-do items, use handwriting-recognition, and synchronize with most major daily-planner software.
Bonus: wacky $30 (U.S.) keyboard allows for quickish data entry. PC only. At royalnet.com Tel: (908) 526-8200.
VOICE DICTATION TO GO
Voice-dictation software gets a bad rap--indeed, it's been parodied here in this magazine in recent months. But even diehard converts agree that the main problem with voice-recognition systems is that you're tied down to your PC. Enter Dragon Systems' NaturallySpeaking Mobile, a handheld digital recorder: You can take notes on the go, then feed them into your computer for later redaction. If you can get past the narcotics-agent-like "memo to self" feel of talking into the controller, it actually works unexpectedly well. Though background static lessens accuracy, the software soon adapts to the quirks of in-the-field recordings. Bonus: tricorder-style appearance. Comes with the voice-recognition software. Price: $249 (U.S.). At dragonsys.com Tel: (800) 437-2466.
HOOKING UP WITH UNIFIED MESSAGING
JFAX (http://www.jfax.com) The pioneering service offers mostly seamless interpenetration of voice mail, faxing and E-mail. Only $12.50 (U.S.) a month for basic service, with phone numbers in a dozen countries.eFax (http://www.efax.com) Less comprehensive than JFAX--there's no voice-mail-to-E-mail service--you can't beat eFax's price: Free.
You pay for it by watching ads while receiving faxes.
FaxPC (http://www.faxpc.com) No voice-mail option here either.
But FaxPC's software will read a summary of your fax, and tells you by pager or cellphone what just arrived.
CoolMail (http://www.planetarymotion.com) For those who travel extremely light, CoolMail will read your E-mail to you over the phone.
Free, so long as you'll tolerate a 10-second ad each call.
Clive Thompson
Jaye Muller
entrepreneurs
telecommunications
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