User Friendly appears Sundays in the Personal Technology section of The Seattle Times. Paul Andrews is a member of The Times' staff. He can be reached by e-mail at: pand-new@seatimes.com

Copyright © 1997 The Seattle Times Company

From the Personal Technology section of March 30, 1997

New twist on shopping: A computer that does the legwork

TUCSON - A Seattle startup company using home-grown University of Washington technology played a tough hall last week and came away a winner.

Netbot http://www.jango.com showed an automated shopping-tool possessing Web "intelligence" to more than 600 computer-industry luminaries at the 20th annual PC Forum hosted by pundit Esther Dyson.

It was a brief presentation, but somehow it clicked with the audience. Two subsequent hourlong breakout sessions hosted by Netbot drew standing-room-only crowds and pepper pots of questions.

What struck the group about Netbot? Its technology, Jango, is something Web denizens have wished they had for some time. Jango, so named because "it means absolutely nothing in seven critical languages," said marketing chief Keith Zentner, searches the Web and compiles page links containing information on a product you specify.

Say you want to buy a refrigerator. You tell Jango, which knows which Web sites sell refrigerators. Jango also knows which sites review and evaluate refrigerators. You click in your command and the "netbot" (network robot, a synonym for intelligent agent) spends the next minute or two culling the Web for you. Yes, it takes some time. But it beats by hours the far more labor-intensive, time-consuming job of trying to do it all from scratch.

Users take it from there, clicking on pages and investigating on their own which one offers the best deal. Key point: Jango does not usurp the decision-making process. It merely alleviates the drudgery of online shopping. It's more focused than a search engine, which gives thousands of "hits" without meaningful prioritization and misses altogether "hidden" Web information buried in databases and applications. Jango drills down so users don't have to.

Jango requires no approval, license or technology from the target sites. It is merely searching the site the way a typical user would.

Once you find the item at the price you want, it's easy to order online. Jango has stored your customer information in encrypted data. "One-click buying" is the way the Netbot folks characterize it.

Netbot plans to extend its technology to other popular Web content: news, sports, investments, corporate intranets. Founded last May, the company has standout bloodlines, drawing from top Adobe/Aldus executives. The founders, computer scientists Oren Etzioni and Dan Weld, developed the technology over the past five years at the UW.

Netbot will give away beta, or test, copies of Jango for free from its Web site beginning next month. By summer it expects to have Version 1.0 ready for release, available free over the Internet, including on partners' Web sites and CD-ROMs.

A lot of question marks are raised by Netbot's approach. Foremost is, How will it make money? It hopes to draw advertising and vendor support by delivering targeted customers. White page and Yellow Page listings are one possibility; target promotions are another (it will have to be careful not to turn into a "spam" advertiser). It may also do deals with "middle men," e.g., shippers, band-card providers, digital-cash vendors.

Every revenue model starts, however, with Netbot's building a strong and trusting consumer base. The young company feels it's more important to get out and get known; then the money will follow.

Even skeptical PC Forum attendees could see an obvious application for Jango. A recent report from William Gurley, analyst with Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, suggested that Web commerce is taking off. Dell is doing more than a million dollars a day from its Web site, Cisco is on an annualized billion-dollar run rate and General Electric is conducting supplier auctions. "Consumers are growing quite comfortable with credit cards on the Web, and pretty soon it may be as common as punching a password into an ATM," Gurley writes.

For Netbot, the challenge may be simply a matter of persuading consumers, advertisers and vendors that simplified online shopping is worth a few bucks in reduced time and hassle.

Paul Andrews is a member of The Times' staff. Check out his Web home page at http://www.SeattleTimes.com/ptech/paul/andrews.html