Christopher and Barbara Warnock have relocated to Helper where they launched a brand new technology-based business after becoming enamored with the city. The Warnocks had previously successfully founded and sold another technology company called Ebrary and had considered moving from Silicon Valley for some time.
Christopher explained that he and his wife researched every state from California to Alaska and Montana, even looking toward a relocation in Texas. When Barbara proposed taking a road trip to decide on a location, the duo hit the road with eight communities in mind.
On their way to Moab, they made a stop in Helper, where Christopher’s maternal family is from. Their venture through happened to be during one of the city’s First Friday events and they began taking photos, stopping at Happiness Within for coffee and chatting with locals. They ended up spending 24 hours in Helper.
Ultimately, the city left such an impression on the Warnock family that they made their choice to purchase property in Helper and relocate to the area. “We’re really happy to have found it,” Christopher said.
Following the move, the two created Helper Systems and their product, kOS. kOS is a tool that users can utilize to use PDF with new capabilities. Any document that is scanned into PDF is searchable and documents ranging from newsletters to magazines and books can be downloaded into PDF. However, Warnock explained that the tools that currently exist in PDF are not necessarily optimized for mining the information within it.
Through only opening a single file at a time, the benefit of being digital is marginalized. Christopher has developed a new way of working with PDF and having the ability to work with sets of information as opposed to just a file at a time.
The software of kOS lets users effectively open hundreds of PDFs at a time and make use of the features to navigate and find the information, also taking the user to the page that has the information they are searching for. In kOS, when a set of information is created (a folder of PDF), the folder can be imported to generate a word cloud for every word and phrase that is within all of those files.
Users are able to see what the domain is that they are looking at and get a sense of information. It is a much more efficient means to navigate within the PDF while also getting almost immediate access to the information.
This all came about when Christopher desired to build a robot and found himself with a prototype and about 350 PDF files saved over the course of a year on robots. He ran the documents into the prototype of kOS with the word cloud feature and, within 10 minutes, knew the two documents that were relevant to what he wanted to build.
There is also a large amount of privacy available through kOS, which is free for users to download. They do not obtain the servers. Instead, all of the information is available to the user simply through the PDF that they are utilizing. The amount of information that is given from Apple is minimal, not even including the user’s name.
Those that may run into roadblocks while using kOS can rest assured as there is an automated system. If things get escalated, users are quickly directed to further assistance from the Warnocks. There is also a user guide available with frequently asked questions.
kOS can be downloaded at Helper System’s website, where even more information on the business and the system can be viewed.