Kevin Warnock

Today my company Silveroffice, Inc. offered to give the domain goffice.com to Google, Inc. for their use in branding a future online office suite. Today I learned Google is planning to release an online spreadsheet application. If they pair that with their word processing application they already offer, they’ll have a suite, and I think gOffice would be a great brand for that office suite.

Letter by Kevin Warnock offering to give goffice.com domain to Google

I sent three separate FedEx packages with the letter I composed using the gOffice product. I sent a letter to the two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and the CEO, Eric Schmidt. I sent three packages to improve the odds that at least one of them would personally read my offer, which I think is kind and generous. I am sincere in my offer, and I think it’s in my company’s best interest to make this offer.

Click the link above to see the PDF format file produced natively by gOffice. Note the fine typography, the artful embedded fonts, the included letterhead graphic and the vector image of my signature.

I am confident there is no online system capable of preparing a finer quality letter. The technology behind gOffice will one day be patented, as it’s unique enough to merit that monopoly protection.

Just to be clear, my company is offering to give Google just the domain name, not the product or the company. The company will continue indefinitely. It will just change the name of its primary product if Google starts to use the gOffice.com domain itself.

For the benefit of search engine indexing and users that can’t read PDF format files on their device, here is the text only of the letter I today sent to Google:

Silveroffice, Inc.
220 Montgomery Street, Suite 1085
San Francisco, CA 94104
(415) 391-9200

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt
Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

6/6/06

Re: Offer to freely transfer GOFFICE.COM to Google for use with ‘Google Office’

Dear Messrs. Page, Brin & Schmidt:

I founded Silveroffice, Inc., the makers of gOFFICE.com, on 3/3/03 with the vision of
creating an online office suite.

I saw the news of Google Spreadsheets today, and it appears Google will soon offer
an online office suite comprised of that product and Writely’s word processor.

I am writing to offer to freely transfer the GOFFICE.COM Internet domain name to Google
for use in branding Google’s online office suite.

Eric, I believe you know Eric Jensen, my friend and attorney for the last 10 years, as
he attended Siebel board meetings with you. You may contact him for a reference. His
email is [redacted]cooley.com.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,

Silveroffice, Inc.

Kevin L. Warnock
Founder

PS – this letter was typeset with LaTeX at gOFFICE.com, and faxed directly from that
site, with the graphics and signature embedded.

GoAmerica home page, January 2002, via WayBackMachine.org

On August 31, 2000 I sold my Internet company Hotpaper.com, Inc. to GoAmerica, Nasdaq: GOAM. The news was announced the next day.

Hotpaper’s technology was incorporated into the new owners’ product line. The new product is called Mobile Office. One of the features of Mobile Office gives users the ability to perform sophisticated document assembly on a Palm or Blackberry PDA. To my knowledge Hotpaper invented and was the first to reduce to practice document assembly solutions for mobile devices.

I created the first prototype for mobile document assembly in about 1998 when I attached with Velcro hook and loop fasterner material a Ricochet Internet service radio to the bottom of my Palm III non wireless Portable Digital Assistant. I used the HandWeb web browser to access a stripped down website document assembly website I built. I used Microsoft Word ’97 running on the web server for core document assembly functionality. Word mail merge fields are very powerful. If/then/else blocks may be nested 10 levels deep, for example.

My prototype worked fine and was reliable, but it was painfully slow.

The Ricochet wireless data network my radio could connect to operated at best at 28K, but I suspect it was more like 9.6K on a normal day. I demonstrated the handheld assemblage to my friend Jerry Engel, the Executive Director at the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. His office is in a huge concrete and steel building, so the network was even slower than normal, but when I stepped into the hallway it worked, and I was able to draft a nicely formatted Microsoft Word document with embedded graphics and email it to Engel, all wirelessly. I recall he was impressed. Not long thereafter, Engel joined the board of advisors for Hotpaper.

I relate this early history to show how long I’ve been fascinated with mobile productivity solutions.

I am proud that an idea I conceived of years ago is now a polished commericial product sold by a noteworthy public company that’s a leader in wireless connectivity solutions.

I am particularly proud that today both CNET and PC Expo have voted Mobile Office the Best Business Solution of 2001. Here’s a screen shot of the press release, to guard against the story being deleted in the future.

Mobile Office CNET best business app 2001

Mobile Office has a lot of features, and my technology is only part of the overall offering. But I think it’s fair to say that Mobile Office would not have won this award if not for my technology, because my technology is the unique feature that makes you take notice — being able to complete richly formatted Word documents pages in length using a small handheld device like the Blackberry. To my knowledge, there is no competing service in the world today.

###

I wrote this article June 28, 2011, ten years after the date that appears on this article.

I wrote this article to commemorate what was big news for me in 2001. To learn more about my sale of Hotpaper to GoAmerica, please read Hotpaper, my first Internet company gets acquired, published in 2011.

I hadn’t thought much about the CNET win until June 27, 2011 when I was telling my friend Kevin Casey about the history of Hotpaper. I didn’t notice today marks the 10 year anniversary of the CNET win announcement until I was nearly finished writing the article. What an astounding coincidence.

Thank you to GoAmerica’s Joe Korb for suggesting to me late one night in May 2000 that GoAmerica acquire Hotpaper.

GoAmerica is still in business but is now known as Purple Communications. Purple is a leading provider of communications services to people with hearing disabilities.

Kevin Warnock

Extreme close up of digits on a credit card (photo by Flickr user liber)

My life is both wonderful and horrible at the same time. I am in the most significant love affair of my life — that’s great. But my business is in a mess. I haven’t had any sales in months and I am almost out of money. I haven’t touched my retirement savings, but I may have to before things are stable again.

I got my merchant account approved last week [for Document Automation Systems LLC]. This means I will be able to accept credit cards for online software purchases. I have one woman who appears ready to buy my $50 Web Word Wizard [software] component. She wants to use it to do mailing labels from SQL Server data.

[Note: This post is from my handwritten journal. I wrote the journal entry November 19, 1997. Text in brackets I added the day I posted this entry to this blog — August 13, 2011.]

Bumble bee by Flickr user Pavan Kunder, photo taken August 24, 2011. Posted via Creative Commons commercial license.

[This entry is from my 1976 handwritten diary. On October 26, 2012 I posted this to my blog and I added the bracketed language, including this comment, and also the photograph, which is recent, not from the 1970s. Thank you to Flickr user Pavan Kunder for permission under a Creative Commons license to use the picture. I was in 7th grade when I wrote this journal entry. I typed this post as I wrote it, including the mistakes, so you can see how I wrote back then. Keep in mind this is my private diary, and I’m sure I could have written with fewer errors had I known I would be showing it to the world years later. On March 30, 1976 my family moved from Chicago, Illinois, USA to Amsterdam, Netherlands for about four months. I wrote in my diary frequently during that time, and I plan to post all the entries to this blog. To my knowledge, we did not have an English dictionary with us in Amsterdam.]

I went to school again as usuall. I wrote a letter to My class in chicago. it was a little more than 1 page. I hope they like it. I told all about the boys, the house, everything.

One 2 more days of school till we get out for a 10 day vacation. I am going to ask mom about painting some eggs for easter.

I took my math book to school and did a few exercizes.

Last night the burglar alarm to our house went of, Andy thought it was a bumble bee in his dream.

The people tried to turn it off with the key but it didn’t work I guess it finally just went off. They didn’t even call the police when it happened!