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Up until a few years ago, finalizing contracts or other legal documents online required a lot of overnight FedEx and back-and-forth faxing.  Now, most are sending electronic documents, finalizing terms, then printing and mailing or faxing signed versions.  The next step is obvious and EchoSign.com is working to provide that step.

The site has been around quite a while, debuting back in 2006.  The setup then was simple: finalize your documents together online, upload it to EchoSign, and tell the site who you want it emailed to.  Each person received the document, signed it, and sent it to a fax number for collaboration.

Fast-forward to today and we find EchoSign still going strong, having just reached a million users in September and processed more than $200 million worth of contracts in a month.  The largest change since the beginning has been the addition of electronic signatures, now that most international law accepts those.

EchoSign is based on a freemium model with the basic service being free and extra services and higher-end additions coming at cost.  Prices range anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month depending on your usage level, options, etc.  Some of those premiums include encrypted PDFs, password protection services, and so forth.

Co-founder and CEO Jason Lemkin says that the huge growth in Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing has taken off.  EchoSign is embedded in many of those business-oriented SaaS platforms like Zoho.

Both DocuSign and Verisign are hot on EchoSign’s heels, but the startup recently pulled in another $8.5 million in funding and, Lemkin says, has been in the black for almost a year, with the new influx of funds going towards new upgrades and expansion.

EchoSign is based in Palo Alto, California.  The site is ridiculously easy to use and straight-forward with accounts ranging from free (1 user, 5 signatures/month) to $299 with 10+ users and unlimited everything.

Today, we’re doing something a little different from our usual here at Rev2. We usually review websites, talk about new applications, and such, today we’re going to look at a whole development framework and some of the training opportunities available.

If you aren’t familiar with the Grails framework for Web development or the Groovy background, then it’s likely that you aren’t a developer or in a business related to that. If you do know what it is and are interested in how it’s progressing as a platform for development, you’ll want to know about the upcoming conferences for Grails and Groovy.

There’s one on each coast coming up, the first is at the end of this month in San Francisco from September 22 to 24 and the other is in New York on November 3 to 5. Both are all-day events for their duration, 9am to 5pm, and have basically the same outline and agenda.

These three-day workshop covers both Groovy and Grails information and will bring updates to the current and near-future upgrades to be made to their standards. They workshops will introduce the programming language of Groovy and then the Grails web app framework to go with it.

The workshops promise to be intense and will be taught by some of the most well-known names in Groovy and Grails today. The idea is to take students (attendees) from the beginning point of literally installing Groovy compilers on their system to being proficient in its use and applying it to the Grails framework for web apps.

It definitely promises to be a definite event for learning with a lot of information. It looks like attendees can expect to see a lot of information in a very short amount of time. Teachers will include Jeff Brown, Graeme Rocher, and Guillaume Laforge, all founders of the Groovy and Grails systems.

Europeans and Asians won’t be left out either, though the teachers and special guests will be different. In Europe, starting also on September 22, conferences will be held in Sweden, the UK, Norway, Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels. In Asia, starting in December, conferences will be held in three locations in India: Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore.

This is a great opportunity for people who’re in Web development or interested in broadening their knowledge of it to gain some real-world, useful knowledge on Groovy and Grails.

You can find out more at Grails.org.

Google’s YouTube has finally entered the social media stream with the addition of a new feature that allows users to share their videos on Facebook, Google Reader, and Twitter. This is for those who upload videos to YouTube and goes along with the already ubiquitous share button.

Most users are just saying “gee, it’s about time, YouTube.” The release of this new feature was added with little fanfare, but it immediately got some attention around the Web. I learned about it through a tweet from my own stream.

It’s obvious that YouTube probably has this sharing in the works for the “favorites” and may be working towards a FriendFeed-style feed to go with Google Reader. This could mean trouble for startups like TwitVid, which allow for video sharing directly to your Twitter stream.

TwitVid, however, still has the advantage of allowing commentary alongside the video built-in (so your tweet has comments plus the video link) and it publishes nearly immediately. YouTube still has a long lag before the tweet and Facebook updates actually take place—ten to fifteen minutes, generally.

In my opinion, this is a nice little addition to YouTube, but probably is a bit “too little, too late.” There are already so many easier ways to share YouTube videos that I doubt this will get a lot of play. It’s still just as easy to send a tweet with a shortened URL as it is to have it sent automatically in this way. Faster too, generally.

Most in the industry suspect that Google is about ready to quit neglecting YouTube and may have some things up their sleeve for release soon. Google doesn’t generally sit on their haunches and they wouldn’t acquire something as huge as YouTube, shut down their own Google Video service, and then just sit around and look at YouTube wondering what to do with it.

That’s Microsoft’s job. Haha

Since we’ve been doing so much about Twitter lately, it was time for Rev2 to have a good look at the most popular of Twitter apps: online photo services. Two things Twitter doesn’t supply are photo embedding and hosting.

With the ever-growing field of Twitter apps attempting to fill in the gaps that Twitter leaves open, it’s sometimes hard to figure out what to use and why. Especially with photo hosting apps targeted at the tweet stream. We’ve narrowed the field down to five great apps you’ll want to look at.

Our list is narrowed by popularity and functionality. Not all picture sharing apps are the same, of course, and not everyone needs the same services. You might be a Twitter-only picture sharing type, so you have no need for extras like Facebook and Flickr integration. Or you might be a social media junkie that needs everything all in one. Plus an iPhone app. And geo-tagging.

We’re listing them first by simplicity, so the basic Twitter-cific apps are first, then the more integrated apps for wider usage are next.

US Airways in Hudson River - the pic that made Twitpic famous

Twitpic (twitpic.com)
This one has to be at the top of the “best of” Twitter picture app lists because of its huge userbase. It’s safe to say that most pictures shared on Twitter are shared through Twitpic. It’s absurdly easy to use, has famous people using it like Grant from Mythbusters, and integrates with cell phone uploads. It also allows others to look at photos, comment, and have those comments tweeted. Easy, fun, and quick.

Twitgoo (twitgoo.com)
“What’re you lookin’ at?” This site’s tagline sums it up. It’s a simple photo sharing app, but it integrates with most of the popular third party apps for tweeting and is especially popular amongst Mac users because of its integration with the Tweetie app.

Yfrog (yfrog.com)
Holy simple, Batman! This site, of all those on our list, is probably the simplest, most straight-forward of the photo sharing apps for Twitter. It does one thing: put up photos for twits. That’s it. Of course, it’s from ImageShack and everything they make is as simple and single-minded as it can get. Many of us are amazed that this service isn’t higher on the popularity list.

TweetPhoto (tweetphoto.com)
It’s name is what it is, but it’s also more. This is the first on our list of “integrate them all” apps for photo sharing. It does everything but burn a family CD for Christmas. You can ad geo-tagging, favorite your friends’ photos, share on Facebook, look at viewing stats for pics, and more. This is the not the most complicated photo sharing app for Twitter, but it’s up there.

Pikchur (pikchur.com)
After losing the third grade spelling bee, the makers of this app got famous by building Pikchur LOL, just kidding guys. This is the multi-platform app of photo apps. You can share with pretty much every social networking site out there using this one. It integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Tumblr, Flickr, and others. You don’t even have to sign up, you can just upload a photo and grab a link to it for a one-off if you want. Of all those on our list, this is the most feature-rich and useful, but it’s nowhere near the top in usage. The company really seems to grasp the market and seems to be poised to make a run at the other more known used sites.

That should narrow down your search some. Twitpic remains the leader in popularity, but some of these others are gaining ground as their usefulness begins to catch on. There’s a rumor that Flickr will be adding Twitter functionality as a built-in soon, but it’s just a rumor, so take it for what it’s worth.

Here is a new post-modern twist on a popular idiom:

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the scholarly path that earnest researchers take while stumbling upon “2 girls 1 cup” is paved with domain name liberalization.

We think that makes sense.

OK, ok, maybe we’re crying wolf. But when the green light flashes on the new domain feeding frenzy, the old whitehouse.com vs. whitehouse.gov debacle may look like a footnote in the domain name confusion manifesto.

Here is what we’re talking about: Beginning shortly, companies and municipalities will be able to purchase domain suffixes in place of “.com.” It opens up tons of potential Web real estate, especially for the frustrated Springfields and Main Street Realities of the world. There are a lot of them.

Of course, several questions loom. For example, if this even a good idea? A widely circulating survey conducted by Future Laboratory and Gandi.net suggests the answer may be “no,” as 65 percent of the 1,000 respondents stated that opening up the domain market will litter the Web with “pointless domain names.” (Obviously, they’ve never visited perezhilton.com)

The other question is who will – or should – steer the effort? After all, companies can gain potentially powerful (and profitable) new domains for $185,000 – a mighty sum for mom and pop shops but a drop in the bucket for even mid-size companies. Only 18 percent of Future Laboratory/Gandi.net thinks ICANN should make the rules, while 13 percent thinks the government should run the show and 10 percent think it should be a truly democratic free-for-all – this is the crowd that owns “Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome” on VHS.

The liberalization movement has the potential to clog up courts, inspire a new wave of vengeful hackers and even cost slow companies millions. But that’s a worst possible scenario. It could also make things right. After all, what cyber squatter had $200,000 of pocket change jingling in his pocket? If anything, I see mammoth entities keeping their traditional URLs and purchasing the new suffixes simply as a defensive move.

As savvy ‘Net denizens and online matchstick men await the fallout of domain name liberalization, we can continue to argue over exactly what will happen, but we can all surely agree on one thing that is coming: More awful GoDaddy.com Super Bowl Commercials. Ugh.

In our final installment in this series looking at Twitter clients, we’re going to look at tweeting from the Linux desktop. Since there is more than one desktop for Linux, we’ll have four instead of the three each we’ve looked at for Windows and Mac up to this point.

While the Linux platform for personal computing isn’t as common as Windows or Mac, it has a strong corps of users and a relatively large showing on Twitter. Most of these Twitter apps, like the majority of Linux apps, are open-source and free. The four clients we’ll be looking at are: gTwitter, Qt Twitter Linux, Spaz, and Twitux.

Gtwitter (code.google.com/p/gtwitter/ )
This is a GTK+-based app that has basic Twitter functions and not much more. What it lacks in tweeting, it makes up for in extreme customization. This client can be changed in just about every way it looks and acts. Refresh rates, display options, and more are all easily controlled through GTK+. This has made it the most popular client on the GTK+ desktop.

Qt Twitter Linux (kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=77375)
This client is for the KDE desktop and was obviously developed using Qt. It’s a bare bones Twitter interface and doesn’t do anything beyond what you can easily do from the Twitter website. What it does do is function quickly (it’s a direct API app), and reliably. This is the simplest and (somehow) most popular of the KDE apps for Twitter.

Spaz (funkatron.com/spaz/)
This is easily the slickest of the clients on our list and definitely the most popular. It’s a cross-platform app with Windows and Mac versions as well as support for most Linux desktops. Spaz is an Adobe Air app and is the most robust and feature-rich of the clients on this list. Very slick and functional, Spaz won an award at the AIR Developer Derby in 2008.  An important thing to note with this app is that if you dual-boot operating systems, if it’s installed on both it carries over one to the other as the data files are shared.

Twitux (live.gnome.org/DanielMorales/Twitux)
This client is for the popular GNOME desktop. It’s features cover the basics for Twitter use with timeline and friend notifications, a system tray icon, and a clean, easily-used interface. This client has become very popular on the GNOME desktop and receives regular updates.

Before we go, a final quick look at jibjib has to be given. This little portable J2ME app work in just about every Linux interface, but is technically a “mobile” app made for Java-enabled phones and devices. Very nicely done and at only 30kb.

Of all the desktop platforms we looked at, the Linux platform is the one seeing the most new apps and changes. Like with the Mac, these apps are aiming at being Twitter-specific and aren’t often branching out to other social networking sites. Unlike the other two desktops, though, in the Linux ‘verse, if you don’t see what you want, wait a week and it’ll probably be available on your favorite open source site.

Update: It didn’t take a week, as several of you asked us to look at Gwibber.  It wasn’t included in our testing because it was lower in user-base than the rest, but it’s apparently popular with our readers.  It’s definitely a nice one.

Gwibber (ohloh.net/p/gwibber)
This is a GNOME app that has a small, but loyal following. It supports multiple social networking sites: Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, etc.  It’s a nice, straight-forward app with more functionality than you generally find in small Linux applications like this.  Fast, functional, and clean, this is an open-source product that continues to see fast development.