Kevin Warnock

The website of CBS News published a short review of gOffice for iPhone today.

gOffice for iPhone is the first word processor for the Apple iPhone. It’s a very simple web app, but it does create genuine high quality Microsoft Word output, since the app functions by running a real copy of Microsoft Word on a Windows 2003 web server in a datacenter.

gOffice for iPhone was launched 7/7/07. I personally programmed this web app.

Famous tech blogger Robert Scoble wrote about this app on his blog, which got the app a lot of attention.

Adolfo and Kevin, March 27, 2007

Today I registered my new RTS bus conversion I bought on EBay from Adolfo Sanchez of Merced, California. Here’s a picture of me with Adolfo by a branch of the California Department of Motor Vehicles, right after I registered the former San Joaquin County transit authority bus as a motorhome.

I am so happy! What an adventure I’m about to embark on…

Inside San Francisco Recology dump, March 26, 2007

I drove my new RTS bus conversion to the dump today. Specifically, the Recology dump.

Going to the dump is an experience not to be missed in life.

When you’re driving a bus conversion, you have to use the special scale they normally reserve for garbage trucks. The normal scale is too small for the long wheelbase of a bus conversion. After you exit the scale, it’s confusing where to go, and I made a wrong turn and headed into the huge warehouse space where the City’s refuse trucks dump their loads of garbage. I took the picture above, which is strangely beautiful I think.

That’s an open pit of trash about the size of a football field. There is a lone ski boot resting on that metal frame. And then there are dozens of seagulls having a feast. The smell in this building was interesting.

I just drove through and out and on to the correct building for consumer home trash dropped off by citizens. That building doesn’t smell bad as people don’t typically dump wet food trash.

I was there to discard a few of the bus seats from when my conversion was a commercial transit bus.

These bench seats are heavy stainless steel, and way too big to cut up and put in the regular trash.

goffice screen shot

I recently met Dan Farber, from ZD Net. I told him about my June 6, 2006 written offer to give Google the gOffice.com domain name for them to use to brand their online productivity applications.

Google ignored my offer, even though I sent it via three separate FedEx packages to Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Today Farber published a blog entry about my offer to give Google the gOffice.com domain name.

I am happy Farber disclosed my offer, as it will show others even years from now that I’m in no way squatting on the gOffice domain.

I am keeping the domain, and I will make the site a success over time. Who knows — Google may change their mind and pay me for it one of these years. Right now they appear determined to not antagonize Microsoft by offering a ‘GOffice.’ But over time Google may not care what Microsoft thinks, and may be eager to go head to head with market leading Microsoft Office.

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.

United flight 175 hits World Trade Center, September 11, 2001 (photo by Flickr user themachinestops)

I am writing this in my 1967 MCI 5a bus [conversion] in a campground at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. It was a beautiful day today, and I walked for several miles along the south rim.

A month ago, on September 11th [2001], terrorists hijacked four commercial jetliners. Two were flown into the twin largest towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. One plane hit the Pentagon in Washington, DC. The remaining plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Thousands of people were killed, and the twin towers collapsed. These towers contained 10% of the office space in Manhattan, and were 110 stories each.

These disasters are gripping the world, and the USA has been bombing Afganistan, which the US believes is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect.

I did not know anybody who was killed in the attacks.

I decided to visit the Grand Canyon after attending the Bus Conversion Magazine annual convention in Laughlin, Nevada. The Grand Canyon is only a four hour drive from Laughlin, so I decided to visit. I don’t recall being here as a child.

The visibility today was 8 on a scale of 10, according to a ranger I spoke with. I shot some video and took pictures.

I am less lonely on this trip. It helps to be in touch with my cell phone.

I sold almost all of my remaining GoAmerica stock yesterday, retaining just ten shares, as souvenirs.

[This post is from my handwritten journal, October 10, 2001. I posted it to this blog and added the bracketed language on August 13, 2011.]

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.]

Blue dutch bike. Photo by Flickr.com user ubrayj02. Licensed for commercial use under a Creative Commons license.

[This entry is from Wednesday, April 15, 1976 in handwritten diary. On March 12, 2013 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 ubrayj02 for permission under a Creative Commons license to use the picture. I was 12 years old and 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, The 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. The address of the house we lived in in Amsterdam was De Cuserstraat 19, Amsterdam, Buitenveldert, The Netherlands.]

I got my bike today. It’s blue, and second hand. I am washing it up. but it is hard work because it is very dirty. It has hand brakes that are very strong. It cost 120 guilders about 44 $. It works good. But the lighting system needs some work though. Today was the last day of school till vacation starts for easter. I wrote a letter to Michael Ruddat (my best friend) I will send it to him tomorrow or the next day.

I don’t know if I’ve ever said this before in thus diary but I have a new years resolution not to eat candy for a year this is my second year and I haven’t broken it yet!

Canoe picture by Flickr user Martin Cathrae via Creative Commons license

[This entry is from Wednesday, April 14, 1976 in handwritten diary. On February 1, 2013 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 Martin Cathrae for permission under a Creative Commons license to use the picture, including commercially. 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, The 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. The address of the house we lived in in Amsterdam was De Cuserstraat 19, Amsterdam, Buitenveldert, The Netherlands.]

Today is the day we get out early at school. We are going to get bikes tomarow. I am glad.

We rode Arnolds and Oscars conoe today. It was sort of mixed up fun. We kept turning around when we didn’t want to. But when Andy and I were taking the boat out of the water I stuck my foot in and my shoe and every thing was wet all the way up to my knee! It was a funny thing to tell mom Dad came home today from gronenen where he works 3 days a week and I told him too. He bought us some of the things that you turn over and snow comes down (like this [picture of a snow globe that I drew in the diary])

I am getting rough hands so mom says I can’t do dishes any more.