GO Expands Licensing, Education and Beta Programs to Accelerate Mobile Computer Market Development

Oct 21, 1991 — GO Corp. announced Monday that it is significantly expanding its initial program offerings in response to increasing demand from hardware partners, software partners, and early adopter customers.

New program offerings will focus on accelerating the development of a broad range of new products supporting PenPoint, and enabling GO partners to assist customers who are deploying mobile, pen computing technology.

In January 1991, the Developer Release of PenPoint was shipped to software vendors and a limited group of corporate developers and evaluators on GO’s prototype pen computer. This release was the first step in the process of bringing PenPoint to market.

Since then, over 500 individuals and organizations have begun PenPoint development. Today, GO announced the PenPoint Beta Program, designed to expand the availability of PenPoint in three phases, leading to the production release of PenPoint 1.0, planned for first quarter of 1992.

Phase I of the Beta program includes distribution of the Developer Release of PenPoint on new pen computers from GO’s hardware partners.  This release is available immediately to them for demonstration and development purposes.

Phase II of the Beta program will begin in December. It will focus on distribution of a substantially enhanced version of PenPoint. This version will exploit the full capabilities of the Intel 386 architecture, and incorporates many improvements based on customer feedback.

Following Phase II, PenPoint 1.0 will be made available for general release.

In addition to the PenPoint Beta Program, GO is expanding its educational offerings to enable hardware partners to better support PenPoint developers and customers. GO is establishing the Authorized Education Center program.

This program will enable third parties, after attending instructor training and certification, to deliver PenPoint technical, sales and development training courses. Several organizations around the world have applied for certification.

GO is licensing a variety of enabling technologies. Early this year, GO licensed the Machine Interface Layer (MIL) source code and a 386 hardware reference design to Phoenix Technologies.

This relationship was the first step in providing the tools to enable a large number of manufacturers to develop hardware designs compatible with PenPoint. Phoenix is successfully working with a number of customers on PenPoint designs based on these tools.

GO is offering to license its extensive database of handwriting samples to vendors of handwriting recognition systems. This will enhance the quality and variety of handwriting recognition options available for PenPoint. Nestor and OCRSystems will offer PenPoint handwriting recognition options that make use of this technology.

GO also licenses object-oriented components to software developers to accelerate applications development. Several developers will incorporate these components into new PenPoint product offerings.  PenPoint’s object-oriented technology enables GO to cooperate with its software partners in this unique fashion.

Together, these new licensing, educational and beta program offerings are designed to significantly expand the pace of development and number of quality products developed around PenPoint.

GO Corp., a privately held company headquartered in Foster City, Calif., develops, markets and supports a pen operating system and applications designed to support mobile users worldwide.

CONTACT:
GO Corp., Foster City
Marcia Mason, 415/358-2000
or
Regis McKenna Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.
Mari Mineta Clapp, 415/354-4449