I am very honored to be the featured developer profile in this month’s edition of Adobe Edge— the online magazine for Adobe developers. The article, “Behind the scenes of Sam’s Interactive Reader” chronicles the creation of Storybook Anytime and the production of our flagship Adobe AIR product, Sam’s Interactive Reader. Be sure to take a few minutes and check it out. The AIR Marketplace and AIR product team have been a fantastic champion of Storybook Anytime. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank them for their continued support.

The Adobe Air team presented Storybook Anytime during the Adobe MAX conference in Milan, Italy this past December. Robert Christensen presented a session titled “Monetizing Applications with Adobe AIR” in which he examined case studies that describe how developers are attempting to monetize and market AIR applications. The featured case study was Storybook Anytime and its products Sam’s Interactive Reader and Sam’s Fish Bowl (both developed by yours truly). It included a glimpse into the online social marketing  techniques used via Facebook (and now Twitter) to generate...

The first task that an online business will face is choosing a domain name. Sometimes this is as simple as extending the existing brand name online. Most often this is not an option because some one else already owns the domain. Successful Internet Marketing starts with understanding creative online brand name strategy and your target audience. In some cases companies such as Coca-Cola or Ford Motor Company already have a brand that makes choosing and owning a domain name a no-brainier. For most of us however, this process is difficult given that our company name was created well before we thought...

When I stumbled upon the imagery below from David Armano at Logic+Emotion it really fueled my thinking about business models in general. I have often been fascinated with the “agency model.” There are those, like myself, that believe the traditional agency model is dead. Strategically, creating a business around this model is the equivalent of agreeing to be a dog chasing it’s tale. A company that operates under this model must always be re-inventing itself. It must be the perfect blend of sales, creative and execution. If any of these three pillars fall short it will impact the...

I love original marketing concepts. The team at Reactee has done an incredible job of merging custom t-shirts, text messaging and social networking. Reactee is a company that enables you to create a t-shirt with a call to action that sends a text message to get more information about a given subject. This subject is any custom message you want to place on that t-shirt. When people text a word of your choosing, they get an auto-response to their phone of up to 120 characters from you. Anything you want. You’ve got to build your own Reactee T-Shirt! This is NOT a paid endorsement by the way,...

Seth Godin, marketing guru, suggests in a recent blog post that online, the economics are clear: repeat business is what matters. Amazon has set the tone with free shipping while most online businesses tend to over inflate shipping prices. This creates a profit center in most cases from shipping charges alone. Not good for repeat business. Take for example small ticket items that cost more to ship than the product itself. This is a loser online for both you and your customer. Once they reach checkout, your customer will feel they are getting ripped off- which is the truth. Your product should...

Many people are using the web for price comparison and research. This means that, unless you have a single unique product, your customers are going to judge you as much on price as anything else at your store. In today’s world people hit a web page and make a decision on where and what to click next within 4-15 seconds. Do you want the conversion? Case in point: The worse usability idea ever was seen during the Christmas shopping season last year. The day after Thanksgiving (the single busiest shopping day in the US) Circuit City decided to force all visitors to add items to their shopping...

An article in “Practical Web Design” magazine from December of 2006 talks about the “Appropriateness of the product to the medium”. A graphic from that article has been recreated and placed here for reference. In general, the higher the cost of the purchase relative to the complexity of the checkout process will make your product much more difficult to sell online. Higher priced products with a more complex purchase process will enjoy its best conversion rates through a face-to-face sell (Real Estate and Automobiles) while lower priced products with an easy purchase process are much more...

Make it quick and easy for people to purchase your product. Don’t make them fill out more information than is absolutely necessary to process the order. Don’t force them to opt-in to your newsletter. Don’t make them provide shipping details for software download. Most online credit card processing companies can determine the type of credit card (i.e. Visa, Mastercard) from the number. Don’t force your customer to select a credit card type. It an unnecessary step. If you sell software online, take a tip from these guys.