Ciceron Blog Archives

Untethered and Powerful

At Ciceron, we've been investigating this social group: the nomads. They take great pride in their abilities to be untethered to a place and time. "Time shifting" and "place shifting" are the tenets of the emerging nomadic marketplace.

To put this in practical sense, we are helping a really great bunch of folks at Digital Cyclone grow their subscribership for their MyCast product, a wireless app that sits on your cell carriers' decks for weather updates. (The company's co-founder is Paul Douglas, meteorologist at WCCO.) At first, the app's just kind of cool, until you realize what it really accomplishes: it frees you and provides peace of mind or preparation from real-world realities of the weather. It's actually unbelievably un-sexy. But it's entirely practical and grounded in reality. Say you're a landscaper or a foreman on a construction crew. You live and die by the weather. A quick snap of your cell phone and you know whether to wrap it up or keep going. You're a baseball fan or soccer mom out on the field and you see an ominous cloud heading your way. Fire up the app and you have the opportunity to make an informed decision as to your next move.

Toshiba is apparently launching a cell phone that includes a bar code scanner. Say you're standing in front of a Sony flatscreen TV at Best Buy, and you're on the fence. With this phone, you scan the bar code, and it immediately pulls down the top 100 consumer reviews of that particular television.

Powerful? Damn right. It's about the content, not the screen. The screen is not our medium. It's our option. I'm jacked up about wireless...once again.

Remember the Apple Newton?

Over and out...