Steve Outtrim
Encyclopedia
Steve Outtrim is a technology entrepreneur from New Zealand. He is best known for his success in the early "dot com
years" of the Internet, as the creator of Sausage Software
and its flagship product, the HotDog
Web Editor. He has also founded software company Majitek and environment solutions company ekoLiving and is the former owner of nutraceutical
company Aussie Bodies.
, New Zealand
in 1973 and graduated from Wellington College (New Zealand)
high school in 1989. By 1992 he had completed a Bachelor of Commerce and Administration (BCA), from Victoria University of Wellington
in 1995. At that stage of the Internet's development, graphics had only just come to the World Wide Web
, with Marc Andreessen
's breakthrough NCSA Mosaic, which later became Netscape
. There were very few pages with images, and not much search capability. Yahoo was just a list of interesting content, before it was a search engine.
Outtrim wanted to make a Web page and put up a picture of himself and information about the music he liked. He tried using HoTMetaL
and Web Edit but was frustrated when both programs crashed with the blue screen of death
. He decided he could do a better job himself. He built HotDog
, an HTML Authoring tool using Visual Basic
. It could write Web pages like a word processor, with a WYSIWYG
interface, an auto-save feature and other features designed to make it easy to manage sites with many pages. Steve incorporated easy to use, context sensitive help which the competing programs lacked.
He created his own superdistribution
system using cryptography
and the Windows Registry
. This enabled the business model of Sausage Software
, which was to give away something of value for free, but time limit its use to 30 days. This "Free/Pro" distribution model was known as Shareware
, and was employed by many small software vendors on the Internet and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS
). However very few of them used sophisticated techniques to enforce the 30 day time limit, or electronic direct marketing
to convert users from the free version to the paid version.
Sausage Software grew rapidly despite competition from major software houses such as Microsoft
, Adobe Systems
, Symantec
and IBM
. In 1997 Wired magazine rated HotDog
the #3 most popular program on the Internet, after Netscape
(browser) and Eudora
(mail client).
Outtrim took Sausage Software
public on the Australian Stock Exchange
in October 1996. This made him the youngest CEO of a public company in Australia
. In 2000 he left the company when it merged with SMS Management and Technology, an IT consulting firm. He reportedly made AU$51 million from the company after selling off large parts of his share before the dot com crash.
Outtrim was an early promoter of Java
technology from Sun Microsystems
, creating the first Java applets to be sold over the Internet and the first Java micropayments system.
Since then he has been involved in a number of start-up companies, most notably as:
Dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...
years" of the Internet, as the creator of Sausage Software
Sausage Software
Sausage Software was an Australian software company, founded by entrepreneur Steve Outtrim, which produced one of the world's most successful web editors: the HotDog web authoring tool...
and its flagship product, the HotDog
HotDog
HotDog is the name of the HTML web editing tool developed by Sausage Software in the mid-1990s. At the time of its development, there were only a small number of HTML editors available on the market and HotDog gathered significant interest from web users due to its ease of use and "What you see...
Web Editor. He has also founded software company Majitek and environment solutions company ekoLiving and is the former owner of nutraceutical
Nutraceutical
Nutraceutical, a portmanteau of the words “nutrition” and “pharmaceutical”, is a food or food product that reportedly provides health and medical benefits, including the prevention and treatment of disease. Health Canada defines the term as "a product isolated or purified from foods that is...
company Aussie Bodies.
Early life and education
Outtrim was born in WellingtonWellington
Wellington is the capital city and third most populous urban area of New Zealand, although it is likely to have surpassed Christchurch due to the exodus following the Canterbury Earthquake. It is at the southwestern tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Rimutaka Range...
, New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
in 1973 and graduated from Wellington College (New Zealand)
Wellington College (New Zealand)
Wellington College is a state secondary school for boys in Mount Victoria in Wellington, New Zealand.-History:Wellington College opened in 1867 as Wellington Grammar School in Woodward Street, though Sir George Grey gave the school a deed of endowment in 1853. In 1874 it opened at its present...
high school in 1989. By 1992 he had completed a Bachelor of Commerce and Administration (BCA), from Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a former constituent college of the University of New Zealand. It is particularly well known for its programmes in law, the humanities, and some scientific disciplines, but offers a broad range of other courses...
First business success
Outtrim founded Sausage SoftwareSausage Software
Sausage Software was an Australian software company, founded by entrepreneur Steve Outtrim, which produced one of the world's most successful web editors: the HotDog web authoring tool...
in 1995. At that stage of the Internet's development, graphics had only just come to the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
, with Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard...
's breakthrough NCSA Mosaic, which later became Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
. There were very few pages with images, and not much search capability. Yahoo was just a list of interesting content, before it was a search engine.
Outtrim wanted to make a Web page and put up a picture of himself and information about the music he liked. He tried using HoTMetaL
HoTMetaL
HoTMetaL was a very early commercial HTML-authoring software, released in 1994 by SoftQuad Software of Toronto, Canada.Based on the SGML engine of SoftQuad Author/Editor, HoTMetaL was released with a free version and a professional version . There was also a "light" version...
and Web Edit but was frustrated when both programs crashed with the blue screen of death
Blue Screen of Death
To forse a BSOD Open regedit.exe,Then search: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\i8042prt\ParametersThen make a new DWORD called "CrashOnCtrlScroll" And set the value to 1....
. He decided he could do a better job himself. He built HotDog
HotDog
HotDog is the name of the HTML web editing tool developed by Sausage Software in the mid-1990s. At the time of its development, there were only a small number of HTML editors available on the market and HotDog gathered significant interest from web users due to its ease of use and "What you see...
, an HTML Authoring tool using Visual Basic
Visual Basic
Visual Basic is the third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model...
. It could write Web pages like a word processor, with a WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
interface, an auto-save feature and other features designed to make it easy to manage sites with many pages. Steve incorporated easy to use, context sensitive help which the competing programs lacked.
He created his own superdistribution
Superdistribution
Superdistribution is an approach to distributing digital products such as software, videos, and recorded music in which the products are made publicly available and distributed in encrypted form instead of being sold in retail outlets or online shops...
system using cryptography
Cryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
and the Windows Registry
Windows registry
The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores configuration settings and options on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It contains settings for low-level operating system components as well as the applications running on the platform: the kernel, device drivers, services, SAM, user...
. This enabled the business model of Sausage Software
Sausage Software
Sausage Software was an Australian software company, founded by entrepreneur Steve Outtrim, which produced one of the world's most successful web editors: the HotDog web authoring tool...
, which was to give away something of value for free, but time limit its use to 30 days. This "Free/Pro" distribution model was known as Shareware
Shareware
The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...
, and was employed by many small software vendors on the Internet and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
). However very few of them used sophisticated techniques to enforce the 30 day time limit, or electronic direct marketing
Direct marketing
Direct marketing is a channel-agnostic form of advertising that allows businesses and nonprofits to communicate straight to the customer, with advertising techniques such as mobile messaging, email, interactive consumer websites, online display ads, fliers, catalog distribution, promotional...
to convert users from the free version to the paid version.
Sausage Software grew rapidly despite competition from major software houses such as Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
, Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
, Symantec
Symantec
Symantec Corporation is the largest maker of security software for computers. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock market index.-History:...
and IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
. In 1997 Wired magazine rated HotDog
HotDog
HotDog is the name of the HTML web editing tool developed by Sausage Software in the mid-1990s. At the time of its development, there were only a small number of HTML editors available on the market and HotDog gathered significant interest from web users due to its ease of use and "What you see...
the #3 most popular program on the Internet, after Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
(browser) and Eudora
Eudora (e-mail client)
Eudora is an e-mail client used on the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also supports several palmtop computing platforms, including Newton and the Palm OS....
(mail client).
Dot-com pioneer
Outtrim was one of the first people to create a successful global e-commerce business on the Internet. Sausage.com was a fully automated business, open 24/7 in every country in the world and with no staff or inventory required to make a sale. Steve employed software developers and customer support staff, who used the internet to rapidly incorporate user suggestions into the product and release them back to the user community. Within a month of launch he had customers in more than 200 different countries. The customers would get the program for free, use it for 30 days, then if they wanted to keep using it, provide their credit card details to a secure web server, and receive an email with a 16-digit licensing code. This code was locked to the user name and email address using a cryptographic hash, to discourage piracy.Outtrim took Sausage Software
Sausage Software
Sausage Software was an Australian software company, founded by entrepreneur Steve Outtrim, which produced one of the world's most successful web editors: the HotDog web authoring tool...
public on the Australian Stock Exchange
Australian Stock Exchange
The Australian Securities Exchange was created by the merger of the Australian Stock Exchange and the Sydney Futures Exchange in July 2006. It is the primary stock exchange group in Australia....
in October 1996. This made him the youngest CEO of a public company in Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
. In 2000 he left the company when it merged with SMS Management and Technology, an IT consulting firm. He reportedly made AU$51 million from the company after selling off large parts of his share before the dot com crash.
Outtrim was an early promoter of Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
technology from Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
, creating the first Java applets to be sold over the Internet and the first Java micropayments system.
Current activities
Outtrim left Sausage Software in an executive role in 1999 and departed from the board of directors in 2000.Since then he has been involved in a number of start-up companies, most notably as:
- Former owner of Aussie Bodies, which was acquired by Healtheries in 2004.
- Founder of software company Majitek, which closed a Series B investment with CiscoCiscoCisco may refer to:Companies:*Cisco Systems, a computer networking company* Certis CISCO, corporatised entity of the former Commercial and Industrial Security Corporation in Singapore...
Systems in February 2009 and opened an office in Dubai. - Founder and owner of ekoLiving which specializes in environmental technology solutions using software, hardware, and networks. ekoLiving is a pioneer in the emerging field of Smart EnvironmentsSmart EnvironmentsSmart environments is a technological concept that, according to Mark Weiser is "a physical world that is richly and invisibly interwoven with sensors, actuators, displays, and computational elements, embedded seamlessly in the everyday objects of our lives, and connected through a continuous...
, which is sometimes referred to as pervasive computingContext-aware pervasive systemsContext-aware computing refers to a general class of mobile systems that can sense their physical environment, and adapt their behavior accordingly. Such systems are a component of a ubiquitous computing or pervasive computing environment. Three important aspects of context are: where you are; ...
or Ubiquitous computingUbiquitous computingUbiquitous computing is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. In the course of ordinary activities, someone "using" ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems...
. - He is currently heading an "energy group" (named eKoSchool) at his former school, Wellington CollegeWellington College (New Zealand)Wellington College is a state secondary school for boys in Mount Victoria in Wellington, New Zealand.-History:Wellington College opened in 1867 as Wellington Grammar School in Woodward Street, though Sir George Grey gave the school a deed of endowment in 1853. In 1874 it opened at its present...
. The aim of this group is to find ways of reducing energy usage.