ThinkFree announces their partnership with Sourcenext, as they will be providing their free online office suite, ThinkFree Desktop, the offline version, as well as their Premium subscription hybrid service, combining online and offline capabilities.
Sourcenext is one of Japan's leading PC software providers, and ThinkFree will be taking advantage of their deal with Sourcenext as a way to penetrate the top Asian market in an effort to localize, operate and market ThinkFree products and services. ThinkFree and Sourcenext will benefit from revenue sharing agreement with Sourcenext paying a baseline licensing fee. ThinkFree Online, which will be called ThinkFree Tegaru Office in Japan, is currently available in public beta here. The official service, which will include ThinkFree Premium, will be released in September 2007. ThinkFree picked a good company to partner with for their move into Japan, as Sourcenext has a high brand recognition in their market.
ThinkFree has been making big strides lately, as they recently launched ThinkFree Docs, their own community for sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The Japanese version of ThinkFree Docs is scheduled to be available in June.