Steve Jobs on Dynamic Web Catalogs

Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mm. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Too. It was delaying as we've gone. Thank you. He wants to go. Well, like this notion of updating once a day. The man opportunity.

You think? Say, God, I would have like that three weeks earlier. I knew you have inventory. Yeah. Tomorrow. Yes. Oh, yeah. Are you great? Okay. I think that's good. I hope you think so.

And I feel we've been keeping it pretty clean for that massive redo. Yeah, we're talking about a lot. I got it. All right. All right. Nothing else. Yeah.

Yeah. I've never been on the cover. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're talking. We're talking about you. Right. You can use that. Time magazine. Talking about how quality. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently. Okay. Yeah. Looks like you're here. Thanks. I'm not gonna update forecast network. Okay. Nice meeting you. Yeah. Hi. Sorry. Really? That is bizarre. A pleasure.

Yeah. Yeah. We're told to make a name tag, but then they said we didn't want to use name tags. Well, I'll give you my card. Oh. Yeah. Developers. Me. What? They were ready to go. I was about to say, I have. What? Right. Yeah. So. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. They'll be. Everything.

Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well. But there's no advantage to it. And the advantages of the web are so profound. Both for the user and for you. The user can spend a zillion more items. They can acquire more information about each one. If you just start thinking, that's my business. And this catalog is the crutch until I really fully get there. You start to change your thinking about everything in your business will change. Everything. And you can also turn out. It'll save you money on the catalog. I guess. Probably. All these color photos separate. Right. Do that all. Yourself. You can produce the catalog yourself.

Set the file. And once you can do that, you know, you start. It starts to get much more interesting. Because the printer that you need doesn't need to be good at five things. They just need to be really good at. Printed fine paper. Finding. Right. Back and forth. Exactly. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Another way. Think about it. How long is it. Right. Right. Right. Right. Now. It takes. It takes. Takes. Really time. One day. But that's not good enough. It's time magazine. One week. Their writings. Pretty good. One week. A lot of photos.

It's one week. So. You know. How. How. You know. I mean. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Right. You know. Turn around. Time. Right. Here. It's been a week. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That. That. That. That. That. That. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well. Yeah. Really. Yeah. Yeah. A high talker. You know, the guy that was like, you know, that's me. Well, and then I'll shut up. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So then the other option. Yeah. Get to. Color. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. First. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That. Yeah. The. What?

For. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I actually thought I would come and see it.

I was really excited to see it. I got a routine for it. I realized I'm quite interested in science. I'm interested in communications. I wrote a book in 2007. I used a couple of her books. I wrote a book on feminism. I wrote a book on feminism. I wrote a book on feminism. I wrote a book on feminism. I wrote a book on feminism. So...

Can I give you Downloads? That would have been first without the title. Well, this just facilitates the movement. I see, it does. It's for a bank case. Just for a child. Get a picturesque photo. Put it in there. I think that would be enough for you. How could you live? Maybe you want to see some good... You know, education... You don't need to worry about gender. You don't need to worry about career. Let's take a look at our blogs. See what else we've got. We can add... We can add... Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sharper Image Sutter Street store.

Thanks for coming tonight. I'm the manager of alternative media for the Sharper Image. And tonight we're going to be debuting our brand new website. Complete, powered and turbocharged by WebObjects courtesy of Next Software. We're going to be going through on this rather large screen here a complete demo of the site. And before we do that, we'd like to have you talk to a couple of key components. So, I'd like to introduce Richard Tall, my current chairman and founder of the Sharper Image. Thank you. Welcome and thank you for coming. I just have to quickly tell you how this project came about. Like a lot of you, I've always admired Stephen Jones.

I mean, I've followed his career and I've always thought what a brilliant and genius person he was. And I thought, gee, there's this thing called WebMania coming up and Next Software is going to be talking about their WebObjects. And Steve is going to be talking. So I want to come hear this because I'm a fan like everybody else. So I go there and I see him demonstrate Federal Express or OAG, Federal Express and the Dodge Chrysler dynamic page making demo that he had put together for this WebMania thing. And I'm sitting there in the audience thinking, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. I've got to have this.

So I just take the liberty after the presentation's over of going and introducing myself. And fortunately, he had enough foresight to figure out, hey, this is a hot retail company. We ought to do something with these people. So we started talking and now, you know, basically it's been about two months is all. And here we are with a full-fledged demonstration of the new dynamic page making Internet Catalog of Sharper Image. A couple things about that are very unusual. One is that it happens so quickly. The other is that it is really an industry first, which I believe will become one of the standards of the retail catalog industry on Internet.

Because shopping on the Internet really is just so much at its infancy right now and it's changing so quickly that to get to this stage really puts us so far ahead of our competitors. No one has any luck. People say, well, is there really much business on the web? You know, are people really doing much business on the web? We sent out a press release last week, which was really interesting. It pointed out that we're doing ten times the business this year, 96, than we did in 95 on the Internet. Approximately $3 million. Not a whole lot yet, but still a substantial business. The volume in dollars has actually doubled in the past 60 days.

Isn't that interesting? And we really haven't started advertising yet. We have some advertising plans. We also mentioned in the paper last week that we've retained what we think is the best advertising agency in the West Coast, if not in all of the United States, which is Goodby Silverstein, to create some new high-profile display ads to promote the Sharp Image stores and our Internet catalog. So we believe instead of just sending out 2 million paper catalogs a month, that we can advertise to 20 million people a month to get them to tune in to our Internet catalog. And when they do tune in, obviously the Internet catalog has to be something they're really excited to see. The Web object software and the work that Next has done the Next object software and the work that Next software has done is what makes it really an exciting place.

So I want to thank you for getting this done so quickly and for making it so exciting. Let me introduce Steve Jobs. Welcome, Steve, and as one great fan of yours, thank you very much for coming tonight. Thank you. I'm sure like lots of you, I own a lot of their stuff, so this is an opportunity to make a balance of payments equally. The thing that is such a great match here is that the Sharper Image has approximately 400 items in a catalog that goes out. They mail that, and of course it's a lot of money to print the catalogs, a lot of money to mail them, and so each page is pretty precious.

It limits the number of items that can be in a catalog to those that are going to have mass appeal. But you can imagine a situation on the Web where there's no printing costs and no mailing costs where you could have 4,000 items someday. What becomes a real problem then is finding them. And what becomes a real problem is that you're maybe interested in 100 out of those 4,000, and what you really want is kind of a custom catalog for you. You're not interested in 4,000 items, you're really interested in 100, and you kind of wish you could have that tailored just for you or at least give some information to the website and have it build a catalog on the fly that's exactly what you want and show it to you. And that's what we're able to do with this technology. If you had to have webpages built in every possible permutation of the products that people are interested in but excluding the ones they're not, you'd be building tens of thousands of webpages. And then every time you change your product lineup, you'd have to touch 3,000 webpages to rebuild them.

And every time you had a price change, you'd have to go touch 3,000, 10,000 webpages to, again, rebuild them. And that's, of course, untenable. So you've got to automate this. And the only way we found to do that is to build the webpages on the fly. To have data in a database which is then used based on the user's parameters to build these webpages specifically custom for that user on the fly. And that's totally different than we see on the web today, right? You look on the web today, you look at a webpage, somebody made it by hand maybe a few months ago and 3,000 of your closest friends are looking at the same webpage at the same time. There's nothing special about it. And that's gotten us a long ways. But to really start to... Create demand over the web, we believe, is going to take this notion of building custom web pages on the fly based on user input.

We call that dynamic services versus the old way of doing things, which is called static publishing. And this represents an incredibly perfect way to demonstrate it. And, as a matter of fact, John, maybe you could just do one simple thing and then I'll turn it over to you to do the whole demo. Let's just go to the GIF finder. This is my favorite thing. There's a catalog, there's hundreds of items in this thing, and the GIF finder just comes back and says, you know, what are you looking for? You know, pick something. Fitness. Men. I'm a doctor? Great. And so just, you know, show me. It'll show me, it'll basically build. Oh, there's only one thing in it?

Well, since you are a doctor and you're a male and you're interested only in fitness, there's only one item in the catalog. Well, make me a female. This is the only one I've got cached right now, so it might take a while to download. Go ahead, take a minute to download. So maybe we want to open up the page. Yeah. Great. Pick a few more. Okay, that's fine. Fitness is basically building a little catalog for me on the fly. All right. Very bizarre. Well, let's take a look at those insoles. Yeah, let's take a look at those insoles.

Great. There's a great product out there. Great. Why don't we see if we can get a few more up here? Let's try it again. That's the problem with demos is they always don't work when we show them. Maybe we should just open up a little bit more. All right. If we just get those insoles back, I'm going to be a doubting Thomas here. Download it. What speed of connection are we over? 28. 28.

I have no idea what's happening. 80%. And I can just pick them and go find out more. There's a few still downloading. Okay, what about this forever golf balls? I don't play golf. You just go find out more about it. This is kind of what we're talking about. And this is the first incarnation of it. I think we're going to continue to learn more and continue to enhance it as the months go by.

But I think already it's way ahead of anything else out there and can help you navigate through hundreds and hundreds, and I think soon thousands of items to figure out what you're interested in and just show you a customized catalog. So let me turn it over to John Landwerk, who I think can go into a little more detail. Let me jump back to the home page here. The idea is that with the Sharper Image Catalog, there are 400 products that they want to get online, and they were really kind of tired of typing in those static HTML pages for each and every product. It would be very much like laying out the products in the actual catalog that you have to go through. It's very tedious in a page layout type of environment to say which picture you want, where you want to appear on the page, the description of the product, the price, and so forth.

So by entering all that information into the database, it's very easy to build these pages actually on the fly, and we can go through product categories, for example, and see various categories that these products might fall into, such as automotive, great gifts, outdoor and garden, travel, and luggage, or we can go down and see what products are new within the catalog. And then this goes back and does a query on the database and tells me all the products that are new. So we could see anything from a shower radio, Euro clock radio, maybe a 900 megahertz cordless phone or headphone. We can get more information about that product. And then it comes back and actually pulls the information from the database description of the product, a picture of the product, as well as the current price.

Here we see that that particular product is $189.95, and I can type in the quantity that I'd like to order and actually purchase it online. Or maybe I want to go back to the gift finder. And I really like those insoles, so I want to purchase those. I remember that I think that was specifically under fitness for men who are a career of a doctor. I can go back and do that search again. And it comes back then with the insoles as the only item meeting that particular search criteria. And it tells me that it's available in men's sizes, small, medium, large. And I can actually just go down here.

And I can go down here. Yeah. Yeah. You didn't come up with anything for me? No. Okay, we've got to get a delivery person to come on out. Wait, she changed her phone?

Yes. So you can meet somebody else? Yeah. Oh, so it's like a room. Okay, this is how I save a room. And then think about the name. Exactly. It's a precautionary thing. Maintaining and updating the overheads. It's secure. Oh, it looks perfect for making your business larger. Oh. But also it's secure. Oh, I see. So you can do that. Yeah. Secure it is. If you feel secure, you can do that. Auto is going to be there. So we've got G-I, G-S-I, and G-C-C-E-N, G-E-N-E. Now G-E-N-E is G. G-E-N-E. And G-E-N-E is G. G-E-N-E.

Is that working? Because when it's not working, it cannot go. Oh. You have a search button. Oh, I do. Just scroll down. I mean, like, this location. I know. And they just might be out shooting a shot. Yeah, I was curious about how close the line would be to make the order to the characters, because I see here, it's not on the schedule. No, that's what I mean. That's what I mean. That's what I'm talking about. That's right. I don't think I'm going to pick on that. I'm going to call three calls. Do you have any information about that? No. I'm going to have to ask you this. I'm going to check on the schedule.

Oh. I'm going to have to ask you this. I'm going to have to ask you this. I'm going to have to ask you this. I'm going to have to ask you this.

I'm going to have to ask you this. I'm going to have to ask you this.