I'll be honest, I'm tired of "free".<p>I'd rather see some definitive information under the Pricing section. I'm tired of getting "invested" in web apps that are free, and then having them pivot dramatically or go under. This is less of an issue for small things, but anything that I'm going to incorporate into my business workflow needs to have at least some semblance of a business plan apparent.<p>Looks neat, I'll be happy to try it out when you're ready to take my money :)
Why, why, WHY does no one even question the idea of graphic signatures to begin with?<p>This thing where we scan a piece of paper or paste in a little image has always smacked of forgery to me anyway? All I need is one image of your signature, and I can sign for you anywhere I want. It's like when they hand out rubber stamps for secretaries to use.<p>It's like somewhere along the line, wherever you see hand-written signatures still employed as a means of confirmation/verification, no one explained to the witless bureaucrats that accept them, that there may as well be an image of a spider cartoon.<p>For reference:
> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Thorne_%28writer%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Thorne_%28writer%29</a>
> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Playground-Irreverent-Correspondences-Online/dp/1585428817" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Playground-Irreverent-Corresp...</a>
> <a href="http://keboch.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/imagesspider-20as-20payment.gif" rel="nofollow">http://keboch.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/imagesspider-20as-...</a><p>Wasn't the whole idea of hand-written signatures supposed to be a pattern where it's difficult to readily forge the distinctive handwriting style of a fluid fancy cursive-script signature? When you paste in an image, it's a cookie-cutter perfect match every time. Where's the authenticity?<p>Hand-written signatures have no place in digital documents as a secure means of authenticity. Why are they used at all?<p>In general, they should be replaced by digital/cryptographic mechanisms, but in most cases the underlying concepts are to hard for people to explain or understand.<p>When people use scanned signatures, it's like we're still stuck in the 1800's where if you were illiterate, placing your "X" on the dotted line was good enough for a binding contract.<p>Am I the only one who sees things this way? Am I alone here?
I've been using the sign feature in Preview on Mac for a while now and love it. I no longer use a printer. Nice to see someone remove the download, save, and attach step.<p>Every time I use Preview, I can't help but feel like the entire idea of a signature is archaic and strange. In effect, I'm forging my own signature with Preview, and nobody cares. While I'm at it, I wish I could not only "sign" the document, but sign it in e-blood and maybe add a skeuomorphic graphic that seals the email in paraffin wax with a old english stamp of my initials.<p>Or maybe someone can figure out how to get us beyond signatures.
This looks really cool.<p>A small respectful note: As a consumer, if I didn't know about Paul's financial connection to HelloSign, I'd have liked to seen it disclosed in connection with his prominent endorsement.<p>I hope this comment isn't taken as an attack on HelloSign or Paul; Paul is known as particularly ethical (thanks in part to his suggesting Google's motto), and I'm sure he really believes what he says in the quote, and this does indeed look nifty. All the more reason to have a little footnote somewhere: So no one can blow this up by claiming anything is being hidden.
I'm already a heavy user of hellofax/hellosign but this falls into the "Fucking Awesome" category of new things for me. This is just WAY better than having to download and drag and drop into hellofax then email from there which I honestly already thought was pretty easy.<p>My only wish now is that you guys would come out with an API where I could incorporate hellosign into some of my applications that require two parties to enter into an agreement.<p>EDIT: Oh and congrats on the google acquisition because I'm sure its coming
On the plus side: this is "Fucking Awesome". I've been doing GIMP + scanned PNG of my signature.<p>On the minus side, your home page loads stuff from Vimeo over HTTP, not HTTPS. Please fix that.<p>Edit: Some usage notes:<p>First, loading a large document (40 pages) takes forever and there is no way to cancel it.<p>Second, there is no way to resize the signature image.<p>Third, my signature is scanned in blue ink. Why can't I use a non-greyscale image?<p>Forth, I happen to have a random contract here that is actually a .gif. Why can't I edit that even though I have the link to "Sign" it?<p>Otherwise, this is still "Fucking Awesome". Great job!
I don't like this landing page.<p>I read the intro paragraph. I would like to see what does it look like. I don't want to watch a video. I don't want to install it either. Just wanna get a glimpse of the UI.<p>None of the links looks like it could lead to some kind of preview.
YES! I always found it tedious to download from email and reupload. Awesome work guys. Keep it coming.<p>One feature we're missing is the ability to have ordering to the multi-party signatures. For example, we'd like to have our sales guys fill out the contract, send it to me for a signature, and <i>then</i> send it out to the other party for a signature.
><i>All signed documents are legally-binding and automatically backed up in your HelloSign account, with all your other important signed documents.</i><p>Is this optional? I'd rather not have NDA'd contracts being backed up on a cloud provider, even if your legal page does look impressive.
HelloFax is one of my favorite products -- takes something I hate but still need rarely (fax) and makes it painless. I also love Earth Class Mail for doing the same thing to receiving postal mail.<p>I have used the other signers so far (as a customer of comcast, etc.), and was looking at setting up service with them for my company (to let people sign various contracts), but it was super complex (still worth it vs. nothing). Seriously looking at HelloSign.
This is exciting and headed in the right direction. I am definitely going to use this and provide a feedback. One of the things I am pressing on in 2013 is going paperless as much as possible.
I really liked their product video. Does anybody know how can we create such product videos? hire agency or something? can it be done in cheap and effective way?
This is really cool - it was one of my most common use cases for using HelloFax.<p>With that said, I still use Preview now to do all of my signatures - I find it really easy to just fill out forms and sign with Preview. If I'm not on my machine, though, and need to fill something out, this is great.
This project reminded me how handwritten signatures are stupid and yet we still use them in 2013. Looks great but probably if you sign something, that document is important and if this project is backing up docs at its own storage, then I must fully trust their privacy policy.
Amazed how many people are loving this. Its cool for sure but its a feature to me, not a company. If it does want to become a company, that's possible, but digital signing software has been around for a while.<p>Hits a great pain point, but i hope there is a bigger vision.
Is Paul Buchheit a "founder" of Gmail? Founder seems to imply starting a company, and Gmail was created inside of Google. Seems like "creator of Gmail" would be more correct.
This is brilliant! Now why didn't I think of that :)<p>Small comment: It's probably just me but when you said "sign documents in GMail" I thought you meant you were doing some sort of email encryption/editing the email signature. Then I thought "ok this is just another random plugin for GMail". I had to watch the video and then i went "OOHHH!!".
Is there an official, recognized standard that this is based on? My understanding is that anything you deem as you signature, i.e., any type of symbol, is, by effect, your signature.<p>I appreciate HelloSign's efforts, but it seems this is simply a market generating effort akin to things like home security systems. Even the process of motorization is a hold-over from a dying age. All the metadata of documents already create a signature that can be used for authentication. I am quite sure that HelloSign probably even uses some of those signatures for their validation process.<p>It just kind of seems skeuomorphist. Do they support other images than squiggly lines of a varying unique manner to represent ourselves? I would like to design a logo or other image to use instead of a stone age process. Take East Asian signature seals....far cooler than squiggly lines in my opinion.
This looks lovely! In the context of my job, though, collaboration features would make HelloSign absolutely killer. I often deal with documents that 2+ people need to sign. Currently use RightSignature for this, which is an elegant solution - but I'd welcome the opportunity to cut out a couple steps :)
Graphical 'signatures' cannot be legally binding as they are trivial to forge.<p>I also don't understand this retrograde step. I will repeat it. It is trivial to COPY and FORGE a graphical signature!
And from a cloud provider??<p>What about S/MIME and PGP? These are cryptographically strong, essentially unforgable signatures that capture time and can ONLY be signed by the party that holds the private key. That is what i would want from a 'signing' provider.<p>I used to love the FireGPG plugin for firefox to "do this on gmail from firefox", however the javascript model in firefox meant that this plugin needed to be discontinued. (It could lead to private key disclosure).<p>Also S/MIME and PGP are open, free, standards that totally make 'graphical' signatures ancient exploitable technology.
I worked for a company with the most complete, secure and law-reliable e-sign solution. And this kind of startups offer, well, nothing more than a straight "signature" solution. They don't offer any more than that. That signature has more o less 'Level 0' of evidence information in case you want to go a dispute.<p>The signature method is more or less like the current signatures you will use in USA, because you don't have an eID like us, europeans, wich allows us to sign documents with higher levels of law conformity, security and evidence.<p>Put it like this: anyone can make this, anyone. Unless you go with stronger methods, profiting eIDs, and certificates, you're just doing an useless signature solution.
I think where this could save more time is if you thought about ways salespeople could close sales easier, since they require signatures so frequently.<p>If this product is just for me (i.e. the person who installs this extension) then it's only going to save me time. How often does the average Google Apps user need to sign something? And how often does a salesperson require a signature from somebody using Google Apps?<p>Just was thinking about where the real pain/problem exists here. And by that, I mean that it's important to consider where does the problem occur the most and have the most impact.
I initially thought this was a way to sign documents by recording a video of you doing a distinctive hand gesture. I immediately did the "finger guns with a wink" move at my computer screen to simulate what this would be like. I was sorely disappointed. Seriously though if anyone is looking for startup ideas, gesture recognition has reached the point where this may well be possible. Alas, maybe one day.
Feedback:
1) Uploaded signature via smartphone option, which is great! But cropping was very difficult. Can you make that window bigger? It was like.. 100x100<p>2) The bounding box for the select tool may have been imprecise -- my scan for my initials had lots of whitespace above it.<p>3) At one point I tried to do a rotate, and it failed, bringing me back to the screen to re-email my signature. But the Next button was gone<p>So far so good, this is awesome.
Looks promising, sorely needed.<p>However, installation did not work for me. I presume that you are under a heavy load, put I'll throw this info here in any case if it's any help for you guys. On the first try, installing proceeded to GMail verification and threw an error after that (Error page on HelloSign.com). On the second try, it got stuck after GMail verification and I finally got No Data Received (Error 324 ...)
Trying this out. If it works as advertised, I'll be <i>very</i> happy.<p>By the way, maybe someone from hellofax can help me: I'm unclear on your international support. Can I get a <i>local</i> number for Israel for people to fax me to? I would love to switch to HelloFax instead of my current online-fax provider, but I'm not sure if this would work.
Small annoyance: the site only seems to work with a screen width > 1200px.<p>Maybe there are no Mac users in the company (I'd be surprised), but on OSX the standard is <i>not</i> to browse in full-screen mode, but with a window little wider than 980px, the most common site width. This has been happening a lot lately and seriously bugs me.
I've used Adobe Acrobat Reader in the past to sign documents, it's also free and many people already have it installed: <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/features.html#categorylens_featureset_0" rel="nofollow">http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/features.html#categoryl...</a><p>I guess this is cool because it's "in the cloud".
Great, congrats. The startup instructions are a bit weird. I think you should just get asked your signature if you don't have one and then ask you to install the extension. (I saw no link to ask to install the extension on the website. I'll recheck later on or search on the chrome extension website)
Sound awesome but unfortunately it seems to not work if you don't use the US-English version of Gmail + even after I changed that I received the following message after hitting the "sign" link: "error: HelloSign couldn't parse your attachment."
It's nice but most contracts that I've signed demand that you return the contract to them in paper form anyway.<p>But having the option to sign it, then print it off and send it via snail mail does save one step I suppose
Any plans on adding cryptographically signed PDF support? While this is nicely convenient I'd rather cryptographically sign stuff in Acrobat than just stick an image of my signature on it.
I just used this web app and was blown away. Amazing job and no, I am not an investor, adviser, employee of this company. Just a guy who loves smart and beautifully engineered products.
Looks awesome. but signing Excel files is broken. It generates PDF file but extension is still Xls, so Excel won't open it after signing. hopefully you are aware of this bug :) good luck
You can already do this with Mac OS X...<p><a href="http://www.cultofmac.com/127459/sign-your-pdfs-in-preview-os-x-tips/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cultofmac.com/127459/sign-your-pdfs-in-preview-os...</a>
The product looks great, and I wish you guys luck. <i>But</i>: the header image looks partially loaded. It's quite jarring. And the site kinda feels like Subtlepatterns.com Roulette.
I use PDFPen instead to sign PDFs by dragging and dropping a signature into the .pdf and saving it. For sending contracts out I use RightSignature which saves a ton of time.
It fails with message "HelloSign couldn't parse your attachment." when I try to sign a document which has non-latin characters in its file name (like German umlauts üäö).
Since signing is now just an image, not sure how much value signing really should have.
Anybody can sign for you once they got one documented signed from you.
Really cool. But why do I get an email to "verify my email address" when you use Gmail's authentication APIs to link to my Gmail account in the first place?
Some worldwide community already invented a stable and maintained, production-compatible, free and open source cryptographic digital signature, with public-key infrastructure & certificate authority ? GPG/PGP & Web of trust concepts are so 2000-and-late! Let's SSAS all that open stuff & fuck the market with another new (temporary) "free" app.