Dear faithful WeSync user,

I appreciate your continued commitment to the WeSync service that allows you to share contacts and multiple calendars between your PC, your Palm handheld, and those of your co-workers, family, and friends.

Major changes in the service are about to unfold, and I wanted to share with you what's coming. First though, some history.

WeSync was conceived in the late 1990s and developed using venture funding. As the founding team rolled out the software and service, word spread rapidly. In these dotcom years, the mantra was "eyeballs" - attract as many people as you can with free software and services and let someone else worry about figuring out how to get revenue from it. Thus from those first days, the WeSync service has always been free.

In a stroke of genius (or perhaps luck), the founders sold the WeSync company to Palm for between $40 and $50 million in early 2001, just before the dotcom bust. In the time that followed, Palm split into to companies, PalmOne for hardware, and PalmSource for the Palm Operating System. WeSync went with PalmSource. However, as the dotcom bust settled into the Palm marketplace and the management of PalmSource evaluated their new role, they decided that the WeSync service did not align with their core business of licensing operating systems.

In September 2002, PalmSource decided to wind down the WeSync service. Due to the vocal demands of many of you, PalmSource decided to continue the service, but discontinued support and made it difficult for new users to sign up. At that time, I began negotiating with PalmSource to acquire the rights to WeSync.

My name is John Tanner. I received my Ph.D. from Caltech in 1986 and in 1988 founded Tanner Research, Inc. This company has grown to over 50 people doing a variety of high-tech businesses. You can check us out at www.tanner.com. Our biggest division develops very sophisticated software for the design of integrated circuits that we sell to electrical engineers worldwide.

But why bring WeSync into this company? Because quite simply, I believed that WeSync was a fantastic service. At that point, I had used it for several years and found it very efficient to have two calendars on my Palm device - one for my business appointments that I sync with Outlook, and another that I share with my wife and children so that we won't miss any sporting events, school events, etc. I believed then and still believe now that many busy people have the same need as I to share calendars and contacts. And now here's the real kicker - I believe that this need is so acute that many people will actually pay money for this service.

Based on this belief that there could be a revenue producing, yes even eventually a profitable business in shared calendars and contacts, I negotiated with PalmSource and eventually acquired the rights to WeSync for Tanner Research. We closed the deal in February 2004. By then, most of the original WeSync team had dissipated. Some still work for Palm, but others had left and joined other companies. We were able to attract Ben Earle, one of the early WeSync team members who headed up technical support and has an extensive knowledge of the service. We assembled our own team of developers and began overhauling WeSync.

As you may have already seen through our news window, we have completely replaced the server hardware and software in order to increase the speed, capacity, and reliability of the service. More recently, we have begun development on all components of the service . By the way, one of the terms of our acquisition from PalmSource was that we change the name. After a long search, we settled on ClearSync. The name is meant to convey reliable, error-free transmission and hint at what we're working toward, which is transparent syncing. We'll tell you more about that, ClearSync V2.0, when its closer to shipping.

What will be shipping soon is ClearSync V1.0. It will be very similar to the WeSync version 1.5 that most of you are using except it will have some improvements and one significant difference. In order to continue using the service, everyone or at least someone in your sharing group will need to pay for a subscription. We have agonized over the pricing. We need it to be enough to support our operations and development, yet we want it to be small enough so that many people will sign up for the service. We have defined 3 tiers of service that you can select from.

ClearSync Free service

We will shortly introduce a new capability to view calendars from a web browser. With this capability, you will NOT be able to create or edit calendars or events, but you will be able to view calendars created by someone with a paid subscription. With the free service, there will be no PC desktop or Palm handheld software and thus no alarm capability. The free service does, however, allow one subscriber, say an administrator at a doctors office, or a soccer coach, to create and maintain calendars that can be viewed by any number of people using browsers running on PCs, Macs, or whatever. By the way, we may eventually put advertisements on these free calendars. There will be no email or phone support for the free service, but since its browser based, most users won't feel the need for support.

ClearSync Silver service

We will shortly introduce ClearSync 1.0 Silver. The cost will be $19.95 per year of subscription, and additional subscriptions, purchased at the same time, are $9.95 per year. Thus a husband and wife team can subscribe together and share their calendars for $29.90 per year. ClearSync 1.0 will have functionality similar to WeSync 1.5 but will support modern Palm devices running PalmOS 5 (Garnet) including Zire and Treo. It will support the 5-way navigation keys. For the first time, the desktop component will support printing. ClearSync Silver will include email support.

ClearSync Gold service

ClearSync Gold service will include everything in the Silver service and in addition support wireless synchronization. To use this feature of course, you need a wireless handheld such as Treo or Zire. In addition, the Gold service provides encrypted Internet communications for additional security of company-sensitive calendar or contact information. The Gold service will be $59.95 per year and additional subscribers, purchased at the same time, are $29.95 per year. The Gold service also will include telephone support.

So there you have it. I hope you feel the service you've been receiving is valuable and worth subscribing to in the future. But don't get out your credit card just yet. You've still got some time to use the service for free. We will send you another email message when we are ready to accept payment. Rest assured that your subscription fees will enable a whole new generation of richly connected, easier to use applications and services.

Thank-you for your patience. I hope you are as excited about the rebirth of this service as we are.

John Tanner
CEO, Tanner Research, Inc.