It’s been five months since Storybook Anytime launched the first version of its online children’s library. It is amazing the amount of feedback and suggestions that was received from users. That feedback did not fall on deaf ears. Storybook Anytime is pleased to announce “Sam’s Interactive Reader”- a child safe downloadable application that allows your children to discover the fun of reading and learning through interactive media. The application is available to download for free and comes with a free story to get you started. Its easy to use interface allows your children...

Take a break from the normal and learn about the adventure of working on your own terms. Sound like a vacation you’d like to take? Then The 4-Hour Work Week, by Timothy Ferriss is for you. Entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss rewrites the rules and upsets conventional wisdom about work and success in his self-help guide to the new, rich economy. It is not necessary to toil for 70 hours per week, according to Ferriss, who runs a company called BrainQuicken. Successful people, he says, have actually mastered a system of working less by outsourcing tasks, severely cutting back on timewasters such as...

While Director of Engineering at Millions of Us, my team was responsible for the early US content development on the Sony Home project for Playstation 3. This early work was showcased by Sony at the E3 conference (video below). Myself and two other engineers spent the bulk of our early development time creating the elements shown here. Specifically the RC Boats shown in the Home Lobby (US), The Sand Table in the “Warhawk” space and the “Mercenary Madness” retro arcade game for the “Uncharted” space.

Storybook Anytime is a company founded my wife and I in May of 2007.  My wife and mother-in-law along with other talented artists, writers, programmers, sound engineers and voice talent have been working extremely hard over the past year to bring Storybook Anytime to life. Storybook Anytime is publishing a library of children’s stories designed specifically for children ages 3-9. The company is on a mission to improve the education and literacy of young children through entertaining and diverse interactive media. Library access is made available through Sam’s Interactive Reader- the...

Theo Jansen (born March 17, 1948, in The Hague, Netherlands) is a Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor. He builds large works which resemble skeletons of animals and are able to walk using the wind on the beaches of the Netherlands. His animated works are a fusion of art and engineering; in a car company television commercial Jansen says: “The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.” [ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Jansen]

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,...

Some of you may have heard by now that our family’s life is about to change dramatically. Over the last few months I have been able to consolidate our business life to focus solely on the launch of our new company, Storybook Anytime and a new full-time dream job… Several weeks ago I accepted an offer from the San Francisco based company, Millions of Us, to become their full-time technical director. I will be working on 2D and 3D virtual worlds as well as marketing systems for major brands inside video games and social networks. It’s going to be fun, challenging and ground breaking. This...

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...