Q1: Every Company has a story, what is ThinkFree’s story? How did the concept of ThinkFree come about?

A1: TJ Kang is the Founder and CEO and he started the company in 1999. He was able to raise $24 million venture funding by riding the ASP wave. ThinkFree was going to serve up office suite applications to consumers over internet free of charge.

However, back in years 2000 and 2001 the US consumers did not have broadband and the advertising revenue model was not quite ready. When the Dot com bubble burst ThinkFree investors, mostly US based VCs, started to look for would be acquirers. In 2003, a Korean software vendor called Haansoft took control of the company.

	Microsoft offered to bail out Haansoft if it agreed to stop the development of the word processing software

Haansoft, one of the largest software company in Korea, has an interesting history. It's flag ship product, word processing software, has dominated the Korean market for the last 15 years. It is probably the only country in the world where Microsoft Word has a minority market share. After failing to gain market share many times, Microsoft saw an opening when Haansoft got itself in financial difficulties in 1998 just before the Asian economic crises. Microsoft offered to bail out Haansoft if it agreed to stop the development of the word processing software.

When the news of the offer leaked, there was huge public uproar. Koreans who thought of Haansoft's word processing software as a re-invention of their unique writing system, a 14th century invention Koreans are extremely proud of, started a fund raising campaign to save the product. Eventually a group of investors raised enough money to take control of the company and killed the Microsoft deal. This story was covered by CNN and became a subject of University of Chicago economist Marvin Zonis' book titled "Kimchi Matters".

Haansoft acquired ThinkFree to expand its markets beyond Korea. Although, Haansoft is a profitable company, due to the mature markets they are in and ever present threats from Microsoft, their share prices had stagnated. However, after the ThinkFree acquisition, their stocks have a new life. Every time there is major media coverage about ThinkFree and emerging online office market, Haansoft share price goes up.

Q2: Jonathan, tell us more about the application ThinkFree Online?

A2: ThinkFree was started in 1999, we developed ThinkFree Office at that time and it was entirely developed in Java. Sun started talking about how they were going to deliver all technology through the web using Java. So, we thought great, let’s use this for an online office suite.

Soon after, we realised that the bandwidth was still an issue and so was the way to monetise the application. So, we decided to package it and sell it on CDs. And, thus we came out with our desktop application.

	ThinkFree lets the users choose how they best interact with the software whether it’s online, offline or behind their own firewall.

And, in 2005, we released an online version on ThinkFree.com. In April of this year (2006), we released another version, which allowed for collaboration, version tracking, including many of the web 2.0 features that we have come to know and love. We also added some really great mashups that we have been able to do with Flickr, Creative Commons and del.icio.us.

We actually have four different product lines. We have the online version which is free and is ad revenue supported. Later on this year, we will be coming out with a premium subscription service. It will add a few administrative tools and more functionality. We also have a server version, which can be installed on your own server and run behind your own firewall and it is then served up to your employees over the web. We also have the desktop version and a portable version that runs on the U3 SmartDrive

We are also the only company that offers the ability to work in either Quick Edit or Power Edit modes. Quick Edit is the fast food model, sometimes you just need to eat and run. Power Edit is the gourmet meal. Sometimes the gourmet meal takes a little longer, but when you need to have all the fixings it is the only thing that will hit the spot.

	We offer the ability to work in Quick Edit and Power Edit modes

ThinkFree, provides the best Microsoft Office compatibility compared to the other alternative office suites out there. To that end we developed our applications using native Microsoft Office file formats such as .doc, .xls. and .ppt.