I haven’t used it yet, but I plan on sending out something within the next few days. Will post back with the outcome and my feelings on the service.

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The downturn in the economy has businesses of all sizes thinking how they could enhance their efficiency and cut costs, without damaging their business results in today’s business environment. We, at xyzmo SIGNificant believe that in these tough times business could extremely streamline their processes by embedding a simple solution, such as the electronic signature, to optimize the way they work, thus enable a TRUE paperless workflow and have a chance to turn a crisis into an opportunity.

Most of the companies today, automate their business processes and document workflow procedures, leaving the approval stage the only component that requires the need of paper. Digital and electronic signatures replace the concept of traditional paper-based signing with an electronic one. Signing the original electronic document saves companies on labor, faxing and mailing costs. Additionally digital signatures safeguard electronic documents and files by allowing the authentication of the signatory and verification of the original document. By embedding these solutions in their business, companies will no longer need to print documents and brake the electronic document cycle solely for the purpose of capturing a handwritten signature, therefore establishing a fully digitized process.
When considering the operational overhead of paper-based processes, the cost of each document becomes fairly high. From the experience we acquired in xyzmo SIGNificant, we learnt that the simple step of embedding en electronic signature solution enables business to achieve two important goals, which are making and saving more money, resulting in a better bottom line with a quick and proven ROI.

http://www.xyzmo.com/

The specific technology in the US is not mandated. The European Directive tries to standardize on an electronic signature based on XMLDSig (or now XADeS) thus requiring trusted third party providers and implying personal certificates. Many of the electronic signature software suppliers “sign” the document using their own or the customers certificate. This is primarily for message authentication – the user authentication is carried out by other means because most customers don’t have personal certificates. Depending on the nature of the contract this can be as simple as receiving an email at a verified email address such as is done with Echosign’s basic service.

I have a non-commercial blog at http://esignaturepost.com/ where we can discuss things around esignatures. In fact – I’m always open for experts to author posts however I would like them to have technical merit and be of general interest rather than blatant pushing of product.

I work for a digital signature solution provider called ARX. We have on our site a white paper on the legal aspect of digital signatures around the world which you might find useful.

I forgot to mention that in these 200 papers up to 24 BGN, I include the price of the ink and/or toner you’d use. For ~25 BGN, one can get a toner for a laser printer that can be used for somewhere between 300 and 1200 copies, depending on the model of the printer and the amount of black on each paper.

P.S. Sitepoint, why can’t we (registered users) edit our comments?!? At least until a new one has arrived in the queue? Pleeease?

Such a signature costs 24 BGN (~12€) for personal use, and 60 BGN (~30€), whereas a roll of ~100 plain A4 papers costs 1 BGN (~0.5€). Unless you need to print+sign+scan more than 200 papers per year, you don’t have a deal. In a country with a total of 7 milion people, from which only about 3 million are potential customers (right age), and even fewer would be actual customers (being the decision maker, wanting to do something with the web, living too far from you to go to your office or for you to go to theirs, etc.), it’s truly hard to find people that need to sign more than 200 papers per year. Thus, it’s nearly impossible to find clients that have such signatures for their companies or bosses on the very least.

In my town (which btw, is the second biggest one in Bulgaria, so you’d expect to have some rich people around), I only know 3 or 4 companies that need to do this kind of procedure that many times. The rest work on solid contracts (thus, they do this procedure 1 or 2 times per year tops; I know of at least 10 such big companies), or (the larger amount of people, myself included) rarely work with contracts, and are thus willing to go the extra mile (which is, quite literally, a mile or two) to the client’s office.
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I really wish the situation was different though… I really wish there were more people and companies with digital signatures around… other than the “cost saving” factor, everything else you mention is still valid, even in my twisted home land.