Adobe Developer Profile: Mike Johnston

Posted by Mike Johnston on Apr 7, 2009 in Featured Articles, Online Marketing, Personal, Project Updates | 0 comments

adobe-logo1I 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.

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Storybook Anytime presented at the Adobe MAX Conference in Milan

Posted by Mike Johnston on Mar 25, 2009 in Online Marketing, Project Updates | 0 comments

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 interest in the company.

You can view the full presentation here at the Adobe Air blog. Thanks Adobe. You guys rock!

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Cause a Reaction People!

Posted by Mike Johnston on Jan 22, 2008 in Online Marketing, Opinion | 0 comments

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, I ordered my shirts today.

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Profit from your products - Ship them for free!

Posted by Mike Johnston on Oct 11, 2007 in Online Marketing, Startups | 0 comments

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 have enough profit margin alone to sustain free shipping. Otherwise it’s not a good product to be sold online. This will allow you to better serve your customers and increase repeat business.
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