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The straightforward method to take advantage of airSlate SignNow features
In the current rapid business landscape, optimizing your document signature workflow is crucial. airSlate SignNow provides an intuitive and budget-friendly platform that enables companies to transmit and electronically sign documents effectively. This guide will lead you through the easy steps to begin using airSlate SignNow and discover its numerous advantages.
Follow these straightforward steps to make use of airSlate SignNow
- Launch your web browser and go to the airSlate SignNow homepage.
- Sign up for a complimentary trial account or log into your existing account.
- Select the document you want to sign or send for a signature and upload it.
- If you intend to use this document again, save it as a template for future use.
- Open your uploaded file to make necessary modifications: add fillable fields or enter specific details.
- Finalize your document with your signature and assign fields for signatories' signatures.
- Press 'Continue' to complete your setup and send an eSignature request.
With airSlate SignNow, organizations can anticipate signNow returns on investment due to its comprehensive features—an economical option for small to medium-sized enterprises. The platform is built for smooth scaling, making document handling effortless.
Enjoy clear pricing without any hidden charges, ensuring you are fully aware of what you are paying. With 24/7 assistance available with all paid plans, you can feel assured that support is just a call away. Begin using airSlate SignNow today to improve your document signing experience!
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Intuitive UI and API. Sign and send documents from your apps in minutes.
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FAQs
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What is e simple and how does it work with airSlate SignNow?
E simple refers to the user-friendly interface provided by airSlate SignNow that allows users to easily send and sign documents electronically. This platform streamlines the eSigning process, eliminating the need for physical signatures and paperwork. With a few clicks, you can upload documents, add signers, and send for signatures, making it a seamless experience.
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What are the pricing options for airSlate SignNow's e simple solution?
AirSlate SignNow offers flexible pricing plans that cater to businesses of all sizes. With an e simple solution, you can choose from various plans that meet your specific needs, ensuring cost-effectiveness. Prices vary based on features and the number of users, allowing you to select the option that best fits your budget.
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What features does airSlate SignNow provide to make the e simple process efficient?
AirSlate SignNow includes a range of features that enhance the e simple process, such as customizable templates, document routing, and seamless integrations with popular apps. These tools are designed to maximize productivity and minimize delays in document signing. With features like automatic reminders, you can ensure that you never miss a signature again.
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What benefits can my business experience by using airSlate SignNow's e simple service?
By using airSlate SignNow's e simple service, your business can enjoy increased efficiency and reduced turnaround times for document signing. The cost-effective solution helps to lower expenses associated with printing and mailing paper documents. Additionally, enhanced security and compliance measures ensure that your documents remain protected.
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Can airSlate SignNow integrate with other software solutions?
Yes, airSlate SignNow supports integration with various software solutions, making the e simple process even more versatile. You can easily connect with tools like Salesforce, Google Drive, and others to enhance your workflow. These integrations allow you to manage documents more effectively within your existing systems.
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Is airSlate SignNow suitable for both small and large businesses?
Absolutely! AirSlate SignNow is designed to be scalable, making it suitable for both small and large businesses looking for an e simple solution. With its flexible plans and comprehensive features, businesses of any size can benefit from efficient eSignature capabilities. Its user-friendly design ensures that teams of all sizes can implement it without hassle.
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How secure is the e simple signing process with airSlate SignNow?
The e simple signing process with airSlate SignNow is highly secure, as the platform follows industry-standard security practices. Signatures are encrypted, ensuring that your documents and sensitive information are protected from unauthorized access. Additionally, airSlate SignNow complies with various regulations, reinforcing user trust in the platform.
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What are the best productivity tools?
My TOP list is as follows:1. Communication tool - SlackOur team has been successfully using Skype for quite a while, and this is a way out for some teams, both small and bigger ones, but Slack is more convenient to use for IT teams, for marketers, sales people, and other industry-specific teams.2. Time tracking tool - ClockifyI like Clockify – it’s very simple, you create a task, you start tracking your time, you stop when you’re done, AND you can also check how much time you spent weekly on each working task.3. To do list – Trello boardsThe next tool I LOVE is Trello. This is a perfect one for outlining your day to day tasks, your future tasks, mapping out your ideas, sharing them with your team members, and so on.4. G Suite.No comments - couldn’t do without it.5. CalendlyIF you have a large number of meetings daily.6. Project management toolThroughout my years in IT I have met and used different PM tools, like Jira, YouTrack, Asana, and TeamGantt. And I must say that each one is good for its own purpose – so you simply choose the one that work best for you.7. Reporting tool - ExcelI have not used any specific reporting tool: I use Excel tables, both on Google drive and offline Excel files.8. CanvaNo comments :) Saves a fortune on a designer for those SMW owners whose budget is limited.See the full version of my tips here:8 BEST Tools for Remote Professionals
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What are the best productivity tools on the web?
What does productivity mean to you? We’re all expert procrastinators whether we like to admit it or not, the digital age has created an abundance of distractions that can keep you from focusing on important things, all day long if it comes down to it. Even the subject of productivity tools comes down to a single factor — it’s all designed for mental discipline training, because even though these tools exist and they’re useful to be more disciplined at your work, they’ll only be as good as the user himself.For: All-In-One OrganizationProofHubProofHub lets you stay in ultimate control of your projects, remote teams and clients even when you are on the go. Aside from giving team member the ability to manage and collaborate projects in real-time, the other big reason for choosing ProofHub is its super simple and brings everything under one roof. ProofHub is as simple as you want it to be (clean UI, to-do lists, project planning, group chat, review deign files, project reporting), but also as advanced as they sometimes need it to be (assign custom roles, white labeling. multilingual, time tracking, private tasks, complex multi-milestone projects, large remote team, n number of tasks).For: Social Media MastermindsBufferBuffer makes it extraordinarily easy to share web articles via social media without headache and hassle. Simply log into Buffer, connect social media accounts, and schedule specific content sharing times. When you’re out and about surfing the web and see an article you know your followers will love, hit the Buffer bookmarklet button and Buffer will throw that article into your queue, which it will then share at one of your designated share times.Buffer helps promote great content across the web and helps you store and share content so you don’t cram articles down the throats of your followers all at once.IFTTTIFTTT, standing for If This Then That, lets you craft “recipes” that allow for various apps and services to connect and work together. For example, I can create an IFTTT recipe that automatically uploads my Instagram photos to my Google Drive account. Create awesome integration with zero programming experience! If you can think it, you can IFTTT it.IFTTT can be utilized in endless combinations, and not just with regards to social media. However, social media users will find this an essential tool in their social shed.For: CopywritingODesk / ELanceSometimes the best man for the job is someone who is not you. Heck, probably pretty often the best man for the job isn’t you. Maybe because you aren’t even a man; maybe you’re a carrot. Who knows?If you need to get going with blogging content (and trust me, you do, because everyone does), then ODesk and ELance are decent places to start.These sites are free to sign up with, then you provide them with 10% of each payment per project. Alternatively, scour LinkedIn for freelancers. Usually you can get a decent assessment of a freelancer’s skill level by checking out their profile and doing a little digging. Whichever path you take, just remember that copy can’t be done single-handedly, so don’t be afraid to hire out some help.HemingwayBack when I was compiling a list of the best content marketing tools, one WordStream commenter (thanks Nicole!) made a suggestion of trying out Hemingway – it’s a great little tool that checks your grammar and highlights potential sentence danger zones as you write. Give it a type!For: News & Blog JunkiesPodkickerIf you’re a podcast addict, you’ll want a podcast app to help you organize your subscriptions. I’ve been using Podkicker for years and really enjoy its simple, easy-to-use interface. It’s free, but you can also update to Podkicker Pro (to get rid of ads) for $2.PocketPocket is a sweet little app that lets you save awesome content (articles, images, videos, etc.) to check out later.Picture this: you’re surfing around researching and see a fun article about the all-time best Pokemon (Arcanine, duh). Hit the Pocket button in your bookmark toolbar and the article will go straight to your Pocket. Pocket syncs across devices so you that later on you can read those fun articles and watch YouTube videos of mini pot-bellied pigs during the train ride home.
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What are some interesting startups in the education space? Why are they interesting?
Here's one noteworthy peer-to-peer education model in Paris newly opened in November 2013 to students around the world, tuition FREE! — École 42 — The school, housed in a former government building used to educate teachers (ironically enough), was started by Xavier Niel. The founder and majority owner of French ISP Free, Niel is a billionaire many times over. He’s not well known in the U.S., but here he is revered as one of the country’s great entrepreneurial successes in tech. This French Tech School Has No Teachers, No Books, No tuition — And It Could Change EverythingAbove: Nicolas Sadirac, the director of the ambitious, free, French tech school Ecole 42. Image Credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeatNicolas Sadirac, a French entrepreneur and educator, is the school’s director. Before École 42 he ran Epitech, a well-regarded, private, for-profit school that trained software engineers.PARIS — École 42 might be one of the most ambitious experiments in engineering education.It has no teachers. No books. No MOOCs. No dorms, gyms, labs, or student centers. No tuition.And yet it plans to turn out highly qualified, motivated software engineers, each of whom has gone through an intensive two- to three-year program designed to teach them everything they need to know to become outstanding programmers.The school, housed in a former government building used to educate teachers (ironically enough), was started by Xavier Niel. The founder and majority owner of French ISP Free, Niel is a billionaire many times over. He’s not well known in the U.S., but here he is revered as one of the country’s great entrepreneurial successes in tech. He is also irrepressibly upbeat, smiling and laughing almost nonstop for the hour that he led a tour through École 42 earlier this week. (Who wouldn’t be, with that much wealth? Yet I have met much more dour billionaires before.) Niel started École 42 with a 70 million euro donation. He has no plans for it to make money, ever.“I know one business, and that’s how to make software,” Niel said. “I made a lot of money and I want to give something back to my country,” he explained.To make the school self-sustaining, he figures that future alumni will give back to their school, just as alumni of other schools do. If a few of them become very rich, as Niel has, perhaps they, too, will give millions to keep it going.The basic idea of École 42 is to throw all the students — 800 to 1,000 per year — into a single building in the heart of Paris, give them Macs with big Cinema displays, and throw increasingly difficult programming challenges at them. The students are given little direction about how to solve the problems, so they have to turn to each other — and to the Internet — to figure out the solutions.The challenges are surprisingly difficult. One student I talked with was coding a ray tracer and building an emulation of the 3-D dungeon in Castle Wolfenstein within his first few months at the school. Six months earlier, he had barely touched a computer and knew nothing of programming. He hadn’t even finished high school.In fact, 40% of École 42′s students haven’t finished high school. Others have graduated from Stanford or MIT or other prestigious institutions. But École 42 doesn’t care about their background — all it cares about is whether they can complete the projects and move on. The only requirement is that they be between the ages of 18 and 30.“We don’t ask anything about what they’ve done before,” Niel said.Yet École 42 is harder to get into than Harvard: Last year, 70,000 people attempted the online qualification test. 20,000 completed the test, and of those, 4,000 were invited to spend four weeks in Paris doing an intensive project that had them working upwards of 100 hours a week on various coding challenges. In the end, 890 students were selected for the school’s inaugural class, which began in November, 2013. (The average age is 22, and 11 percent of the first class is female.)890 students out of 70,000 applicants means an acceptance rate a little north of 1%, or if you only count those who completed the test, 4.5%. By contrast, Harvard accepts about 6% of its applicants. And, even with financial aid, it charges a whole lot more than ZERO for its classes.The upshot: If it works, the school’s course of education will produce coders who are incredibly self-motivated, well-rounded in all aspects of software engineering, and willing to work hard. (The four-week tryout alone, with its 100-hour weeks, blows away the French government’s official 35-hour-work week.)All of École 42′s projects are meant to be collaborative, so the students work in teams of two to five people. At first glance, the École’s classrooms look a little bit like a factory floor or a coding sweatshop, with row after row of Aeron-style chairs facing row after row of big monitors. But a closer look reveals that the layout is designed to facilitate small-group collaboration, with the monitors staggered so that students can easily talk to one another, on the diagonals between the monitors or side by side with the people next to them. Students can come and go as they please; the school is open 24 hours a day and has a well-appointed cafeteria in the basement (with a wine cellar that can hold 5,000 bottles, just in case the school needs to host any parties).Students share all of their code on Github (naturally). They communicate with one another, and receive challenges and tests, via the school’s intranet. Everything else they figure out on their own, whether it means learning trigonometry, figuring out the syntax for C code, or picking up techniques to index a database.Tests are essentially pass-fail: Your team either completes the project or it doesn’t. One administrator compared it to making a car: In other schools, getting a test 90% right means an A; but if you make a car with just three out of four wheels, it is a failure. At École 42, you don’t get points for making it part way there — you have to make a car with all four wheels.The no-teachers approach makes sense, as nearly anything you need to know about programming can now be found, for free, on the Internet. Motivated people can easily teach themselves any language they need to know in a few months of intensive work. But motivation is what’s hard to come by, and to sustain — ask anyone who has tried out Codecademy but not stuck with it. That has prompted the creation of “learn to code” bootcamps and schools around the world. École 42 takes a similar inspiration but allows the students to generate their own enthusiasm via collaborative (and somewhat competitive) teamwork.Sadirac and Niel say that some prestigious universities have already expressed interest in the school’s approach. The two are considering syndicating the model to create similar schools in other countries.But even if they never expand beyond Paris, École 42 could become a signNow force in software education. France already has a reputation for creating great engineers (in software as well as in many other fields).If École 42 adds another thousand highly-motivated, entrepreneurial software engineers to the mix every year, it could very quickly accelerate this country’s competitiveness in tech.And the model will force schools like Harvard to make an extra effort to justify their high tuitions. If you can get training like this for free, and you want to be a software engineer, why go to Harvard?(news link:) This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition -- and it could change everything
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How was Linear B deciphered?
The decipherment of Linear B is justly famous as the first time when someone succeeded in deciphering a script without the aid of an (explicitly) bilingual text of some sort. The co-decipherers were the architect and gifted amateur linguist Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, a trained specialist in the ancient Greek language who had also worked as a code-cracker in Bletchley Park during the war.The first observation about Linear B was the number of signs used in the script — somewhere between 80 and 90, with about 20 signs being comparatively rare. Alphabets tend to have between about 20 and 40 signs, rarely a couple fewer (e.g. the younger Futhark) or a couple more (e.g. Avestan). But Linear B had ca. 60 common signs plus about 20 rarer ones, so it was in all likelihood a simple syllabary (i.e. the signs represented not phonemes, but syllables: da, du, di, etc.)I happily accept correction in the matter, but if I am correctly informed then all languages admit syllables of the pattern da, du, di (i.e. Consonant + Vowel), whereas some do not admit syllables of the pattern ad, ud, id, etc. (i.e. vowel + consonant). So, for a simple syllabary one therefore expected signs of the pattern C + V. (Signs of CV plus signs of VC would exceed 90 easily, and no language has just VC syllables.) Other syllabaries of this sort are known (e.g. the classical Cyprian syllabary), as well as the tricks involved to do things such as writing e.g. initial double consonance (e.g. write a dummy vowel after the first consonant) or writing word-final consonants (e.g. omit them if they are predictable).The key observation after that was made by one Alice Kober who deserves much of the credit (and did in fact receive said credit from Ventris and Chadwick) for the eventual decipherment. Miss Kober correctly observed that many sign-groups differed in the final sign only — i.e. the first three signs, say, were identical, but the fourth sign was different. In an inflected language this might represent with nouns a distinction of case or of gender or of number; and the signs involved might often enough have the same consonant, but a different vowel.Next, the meanings of a few words on the tablets were known from context. Many of the tablets are lists of persons. The layout of such tablets is often as follows:a group of signs, a space, a little stick-man, a marka group of signs, a space, a little stick-man, a marka group of signs, a space, a little stick-man, a marka group of signs, a space, a little stick-man, a marka group of signs, a space, a little stick-man, a marktwo signs, a space, a little stick-man, five marks.The two signs in line 6 appear again and again in the final line of such lists; and they evidently mean “total”. Occasionally, however, instead of a little stick-man, it’s a little woman-sign, and in this case in the final line we find the same first sign as in the man-lists, but a different second sign. Presumably the two different final signs shared the same consonant, but had a different vowel; and this was indicating a switch in gender.Ventris’ great contribution was to compile an exhaustive “grid” of all such cases.The final observation involved the publication of the tablets from Pylos on the mainland. The texts from Knosos in Crete, long since published, contained a few sign-groups which upon inspection never appeared on the Pylos tablets. Ventris guessed that these were toponyms unique to Crete, and he decided to experiment with some syllabic values taken from the toponymy of Crete. For one very common such sign group he tried ko-no-so (Knosos — sic!). For another three-sign group he tried pa-i-to (Phaistos). For a four-sign group he tried a-mi-ni-so (Amnisos). He then started plugging these values into the grid. The masculine word for “total” came out then as to-so. This was suspiciously like Greek τόσοι, /tosoi/. Well, then, try to-sa for the feminine word for “total” (i.e. Greek τόσαι, /tosai/). He then plugged the hypothetical sa into the appropriate points of the grid, and the process continued like one gigantic crossword puzzle. Things kept coming out suspiciously close to Greek. Ventris finally arrived at a three-sign group which tended to stand next to a little drawing of what was self-evidently a tripod. If, however, there were two or more marks after the little drawing of a tripod, a fourth sign was added to the group of signs in front of the drawing. Thus:signs A B C, space, drawing of tripod, one markor:signs A B C D, space, drawing of tripod, two or more marksThe values which Ventris plugged in as he worked through his grid were these:ti-ri-po and ti-ri-po-de. These again looked suspiciously like the Greek words for a tripod, namely (sing.) τρίπους, /tripous/ and (pl.) τρίποδες, /tripodes/. Again and again, things kept coming up that looked pretty Greek. It was often a weird form of Greek, but then again these texts were centuries older than any Greek hitherto known, and languages are constantly changing, so you wouldn’t expect things to look exactly like classical Greek. So it wasn’t too surprising when the words for “boys” and “girls” looked like ko-wo and ko-wa (Greek κοῦροι, /kouroi/ and κοῦραι, /kourai/, respectively), esp. since it was known that it had originally been /korwoi/ and /korwai/ in Greek (note the “w”).Around this point Ventris was invited to speak on a programme on the BBC about his work with Linear B, and one John Chadwick happened to have his radio on that day… Chadwick had dabbled with Linear B before, so he was familiar with the script and with the problems involved. Moreover, he was an excellent scholar of Greek. He had also worked, as mentioned above, at Bletchley Park, and, as he later put it, what Ventris was coming up with looked exactly like what he and the other code-crackers would come up with in the initial stages of decrypting a coded message. It was the right combination of things that appeared to be just intelligible and things that were still utterly opaque.Excited, Chadwick got into contact with Ventris, and the two of them worked the rest of it out; in 1953 they published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies.Interestingly, after the deciphrement was published, a brilliant if irascible scholar, Leonard Palmer, demonstrated that there was a way of proving that the language was Greek without even having to decipher it. Some of the tablets with tripods drawn on them distinguished different types of tripod. When this happened, a word was added to the putative word for “tripod”; and on the drawing of the tripod there appeared handles.Well, when four handles appeared, the word was a five sign group (call it A B C D E); and when there were no handles the sign group was F D E. One could plausibly conclude that D E meant “handled” and that A B C meant “four” and that F meant “no”. So far, so good.Also, many lists of personnel looked like this:group of signs, space, stick-man, one markgroup of signs, second group of signs, stick-man, two marksIn every case when there were two groups of signs with a stick-man followed by two marks, the final sign of the second group was the exact same sign. One could plausibly conclude that this sign was an enclitic word for “and”. As it happened, this putative enclitic word for “and” was the exact same sign as the first sign in the group of signs which meant “four”.Linguists out there, answer us this: How many languages are there in which the enclitic word for “and” is the same as the first syllable of the word for “four”?As far as I know, Greek is the only candidate. (Even in Latin the first syllable of “four” is not identical with the enclitic word for “and”. And even if there is another language out there for which the postulate holds true, given that the Linear B texts were found in Greece, why should that other language count as more likely than Greek?)To give an English example (as did Palmer whom I am shamelessly plagiarising here). Let us say we are deciphering an unknown language in an unknown script, and we can establish on the basis of contextual clues that a group of signs (A B C) means deus, and that the same group of signs reversed (i.e. C B A) means canis. For how many languages besides English would that relationship hold true? Even for closely related languages such as German and Dutch it does not hold true, and even if some dialect of North Frisian or Low German has the same relationship, if the script in question turned up in England, should not English count as the more probable candidate? Moreover, calling A B C deus and C B A canis and the language English commits you to the prediction both that A B is a common verb of motion and that C B is another common verb; and I am willing to bet that this will not hold true of that hypothetical other West Germanic language. Just one or two such examples, and you have identified the language. Palmer, to iterate the point, was brilliant.On the whole the decipherment worked as you would solve a gigantic crossword puzzle. As you make a few guesses, as long as you’re guessing correctly, probable answers emerge for other entries in the puzzle. If you’re guessing wrong, you rapidly run into impossible combinations, e.g. a five-letter word for ovis that starts with “ft-”. But when your guesses indicate that the five-letter word for ovis ends with “-ep”, you know that you’re on the right track. And even if you can’t guess the seven-letter word for “chapel” that has a “t” as the fourth letter, you’re not too worried, because nothing rules out the existence of a word with those characteristics. That was how the decipherment looked in the early days, but in the end everything pretty much fell into place with just some odd bits and pieces (e.g. personal names) remaining obscure.I’ve probably made the decipherment appear all too easy; be aware that it was years and years of painstaking work. Only in retrospect can one see that Miss Kober’s observation was a crucial step forwards and so on.
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What will the e-signing landscape look like in 3-5 years time?
Most importantly, we will grow from where we are today (about 1% of all contracts signed on the web) to 50%+ (the majority) in 4-6 years. The broader market will grow 50x, and with that, the market will fundamentally change.At a product/technical level, there will be at least 3 important evolutions as the % of contracts signed on the web that we see at EchoSign:Seamless web workflow (integrations). Today, it's still relatively nichey to, for example, create a document in Google Docs or pull a form from DropBox or Box.net, review/edit/collaborate on the document, send it out to get signed, and then have it all stored on the web, in the cloud. In 3-5 years, the entire contracting workflow and process will be 100% web and cloud based.100% web-based contract. Today, only a minority of e-signed contracts are created purely on the web. Instead, most contracts are still local content - a local PDF, or a local Word document. In 3-5 years, the contract will be 100% web-based and completely abstracted from not only paper, but from an off-line contract creation process. This makes e-signatures a requisite, not optional, part of the contracting process.Dramatically more functionality. From a functionality perspective, the solutions and market are still at a nascent stage. As the market grows 50x in the next few years, the demands for functionality will grow 50x. Whether it's basic things like HTML5 support for e-signing on the iPad, or tailoring the electronic signature experience in real-time based on the country the signer is in, or bigger changes, like true web-based contract collaboration, the bar will continue to go up.Because of this, the market is likely to end up with "2.5" leading players. E-signatures and e-contracting are too nuanced, and require too much workflow and too high a level of user-specific functionality, to become just a feature of another solution. The level of solution complexity certainly is not as high as standalone CRM, for example (where competing with Salesforce.com at this point is impractical), but it is much higher than simple web apps (e.g., document or content storage) or even web conferencing/collaboration (WebEx/GoToMeeting/etc.). The solutions also benefit from scale and users, but do not have a true network effect. Also, electronic signatures have a signNow legal component, which creates challenges to immature products.Thus, 4-5 years out (perhaps not 3), we are likely to see (x) e-signatures having become the primary way contracts are signed, period, with (y) a few leaders (a la WebEx and GoToMeeting) whose products are deeply integrated with, but not subsumed by, the workflows and integrations of the web, along with a few smaller players with niche offerings and relatively small customer bases.
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After learning stardard German, can a foreigner have difficulties on understanding dialects around Germany?
Good Lord, yes.I remember once being in a train compartment with a very nice elderly gentleman from Bavaria. He spoke only Bavarian dialect. The only way that I could understand him was by seeing, in my mind’s eye, what he’d said written out in semi-phonetic form. From there I could guess at most words using the etymological method and, from general sense, figure out the rest. So between his statement and my response there was always a few seconds’ delay (rather like on an international telephone call in the old days) while I processed his words in the manner described above. As we continued, I got better at it, but it was very challenging at first. Fortunately, he was a friendly old man and didn’t seem to mind, presumably because he was putting it all down to my being a foreigner with below-average intelligence.But do not worry if you find the dialects tough going. Native German speakers unfamiliar with this or that dialect may find them tough going as well. Saxon for whatever reason I found fairly easy to understand, while, oddly, the German friend whom I was travelling with in Saxony, found Saxon nearly impenetrable. In one slightly amusing situation, as we dealt with car repairs, the young mechanic, realising that my friend was having difficulty with the dialect, started really playing it up (this was a couple years after reunification, when the euphoria had ended and erstwhile East Germans were getting a little weary of their western brethren who knew more, drove faster, spat farther, and in general did everything better and bigger than they). When speaking with me, whom he had recognised for an American, the mechanic was kind enough to give me glosses in High German for any truly difficult dialect words, but he had no such mercy on my friend. (Be it noted, however, that he did drop everything to deal with our car and, in fact, dealt with it all that afternoon even though he’d never worked on that brand of car before, needed to scout for a part, and it proved to be a pain-in-the-butt sort of repair. And it was a reasonable price too.)Anyway, even when you do understand everything in German phonetically, occasionally vocabulary will still throw you. I travelled to Germany a couple times during my youth. At age twelve I was determined to prove what a big boy I was by not needing to be picked up at Frankfurt airport. My German at the time was, well, a bit bumpy. Anyway, I made it from the airport to the train station without incident and succeeded in purchasing a ticket for the train to the town where the person whom I was going to stay with lived. Then I thought it would be nice to telephone this person to say when I would be arriving. Now back in those days signs were usually all written, i.e. no easily recognisable symbols to make things simple for blithering foreigners like me. I found directions to the toilets, to the lockers, to bureaux de change, etc., but not to a telephone. You see, the only word in German for “telephone” which I knew was “Telefon” — and what was written on the signs was “Fernsprecher”, the very official word for a telephone. To make a long story short, I showed up on the person’s doorstep without having been able to place the call because I couldn’t figure out the word “Fernsprecher”.Now, fast forward a number of years. I had just moved to Germany to complete my studies; my German was much, much better, and I had just rented a room from a Swabian landlady whose German, despite her dialect, I understood reasonably well, mostly because she lived in a simple world and never said anything that was particularly complicated. Now she let me use her telephone for local calls, which was nice; but a few days after arrival I needed to call my parents in the US (this was long before internet and e-mail, etc.) and this, of course, would not be a local call. I wasn’t sure of the word for a payphone, so I looked it up and then asked my landlady if she could tell me where an “öffentlicher Fernsprecher” was. My dear old landlady looked at me so funny. She had no idea what on Earth an “öffentlicher Fernsprecher” was. It took a few minutes as I explained what I needed, until suddenly a light went on as she exclaimed, “Ach! Sie wolle’ in’s Telefonshäusle gehe’!” So, there you have it. The dictionary said “öffentlicher Fernsprecher”, but in her language the word was “Telefonshäusle”.So I have been tripped up twice by words for “telephone” in German, once by not knowing the official word for it, and the second time by using it.
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Why do the Italians and the French people have a bad pronunciation of English and why do they find it difficult to improve?
On the Italian side of the question, there's plenty of reasons, but I can tell you the features of the English language that gave me most trouble.First and foremost, the crazy English vowel inventory and the damn schwa. We Italians are simple people. We see a we say aah, we see u we say oo, we see i we say ee. It works all the time. What is instead the sound that you do when saying “cat”? Is it an a or an e? Something in between? And for “cut"? These are strange utterances for which I can paraphrase the Italian writer Manzoni and say that they are “so heteroclite, so cantankerous, so feral that the alphabet of the language doesn't have signs to represent their sounds”.Think about the good old fellow Mr Smith: how do you pronounce the vowel in his surname? It's something between i and e, shorter than both and bordering on a schwa.It took years to learn to listen to it and to start using it. Most Italians will only know Mr Smeeth.And, case in point, what the heck is a schwa? A mid central neutral vowel? Mid central neutral? What are we, Swiss? Pick a vowel side and stick with it!Then you have your consonants. Specific training is required to learn to say the two “th" sounds. Most won't bother and just say t or f depending on the situation and the alcohol intake. But it's not just that. A lot of English consonants have got a breathy quality, especially clear when saying t or d. We don't do that in Italian, so it ends up like having a foreign accent.You native English speakers when learning Italian suffer the same problem in reverse.The other important point is that Italian spelling is ridiculously easy. Therefore as soon as we think of a word, we know exactly how to pronounce it: I find that this is not the case with English speakers. Years back I was talking with a colleague from New Zealand and I could not exactly understand how he pronounced the word “optimization" (again, vowels). I asked him if he could pronounce it letter per letter and I recall that the task was difficult for him. At the time I thought that he could write the word and say it aloud but assigning a sound value to each letter was something he wasn't accustomed to.Conversely, we Italians think of writing and pronunciation as of the same thing, with minor exceptions. So when we see two consonants, as in “alligator", we pronounce two (geminated) ls, and it's a great efort (you see what I did here?) to forget to do it.These are difficulties caused by differences in the language itself.We also have into take to consideration that in Italian school English is taught with a greater emphasis on grammar and syntax and with much less time spent on conversation and comprehension.Our school system is designed with the idealistic notion of educating erudite intellectuals, so foreign languages are taught with the chief aim of allowing the learner to understand literature in the target language. At eighteen I could have discussed the merits of the iambic pentameter but I would have had to look up in a dictionary the word for “cucchiaio” (that's spoon).On top of that, every single English language film of TV-series is dubbed in Italian, so we really do not have much exposure to the language, apart from songs.
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What is [math]\pi[/math]?
The number π is a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, commonly approximated as 3.14159.Any circle in naturally occuring Elucidean space, would have a value of π when its circumference is divided by its diameter.Being an irrational number, π cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction (equivalently, its decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern). Still, fractions such as [math]\dfrac{22}{7}[/math] and other rational numbers are commonly used to approximate π. The digits appear to be randomly distributed. In particular, the digit sequ...
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What is the best format for a written business proposal?
We keep all proposals very simple, minimal jargon and easy to read.We use Google docs to either create a word doc or a Google slide doc and then we save it as a PDF and send it via signNow e-Sign (EchoSign).I’d advise you keep it short - 5–10 pages with clean spacing.Have a cover, quick overview, deliverables and pricing and a place to sign.Here’s the thing, people don’t love reading proposals so you want it to be simple and easy to read, understand and sign off on. Don’t go down the rabbit hole on legal jargon non-sense.Ideally, you present this to the client and then walk them through it page by page to explain everything in it. Then ask them to sign it! :)
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