Mobile Radio Simplified. Accessible. Relevant.

Thank you to all who participated in our CelleCast Listener Holiday Party. Of those whose desire to share their story was greater than their reluctance to have it broadcast to the world, below are the winners. Click on the individual players to hear them. They are each awarded a $100 credit to the CelleCast catalog to use on a hands-free car kit, Bluetooth headset or whatever else they choose.

To all who participated, and all our listeners, a Happy New Year!!!

Looking out the window at the view from the CelleCast office, there is almost a foot of snow on the ground. Our winter wonderland set in several days before the official arrival of winter yesterday. It’s a beautiful wintry scene, just in time for the holidays.

As we make our way towards Christmas on Thursday, we want to be sure to communicate to our partners and customers a sincere and heartfelt “thank you.” We appreciate each of you. Your partnership and loyalty to our service, acknowledging the value we bring to radio shows and listeners alike, is what keeps us coming to work every day (even when 4-wheel drive is required to get here :)).

Have a blessed holiday with your friends and family. We look forward to more fun and innovation together in 2009!

Best Wishes,
Summer and all of the CelleCast crew

MocoNews reported today on ESPN’s release that shows the explosion of traffic to their mobile sites since last year. I imagine this will double again in 2009 when people can go right from mobile college team sites over to a live or delayed audio stream of the games. If DVR adoption is more than a passing fad (of course it is) then any investor would be dim-witted to pass up an opportunity to be part of this shift.

College football increase mobile traffic to ESPN: ESPN (NYSE: DIS) said today that traffic to college football content on ESPN’s mobile web exploded during the college football regular season, with 59.9 million visits and 639 million page views, representing 185 percent growth compared to last year.

There is a reason the local news channels go into full tilt aggrandizement mode when the bad weather hits. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we are having a rare sub freezing weather week, and our local channel 8 News has branded it “Arctic Blast 2008″. Not that I blame them. My wife being a teacher and my kid being a student, we were watching the news with unusual interest last night to make sure our school was indeed closed like most of the rest of them this morning.

This makes me think of one of the more inspired reasons why we started CelleCast, which is to make notifications much easier for schools, corporations and more in times like these. Instead of watching crawlers on TV screens, waiting for your name to show up, what if any organization could push that information to your phone in a reliable manner? Well in 2009, watch for VMCast service to rollout, which will allow any group with a list of phone numbers to send important messages to their members. We think churches, schools and more organizations will turn to this service we offer, which will save consumers a lot of time and fuel, helping them to avoid wasted drives and more. The consumer will be in control of how the message is delivered.

Just wanted to say Merry Christmas to all this Sunday morning. We have rare snow here in the Northwest. enough to cancel church, so I want to just wish you all a wonderful white christmas, and leave you with a message I recorded for the Holiday Party about my first white Christmas last year.

Lately, I have been talking to our radio partners about our plans for 09, and although I cannot expound on them in detail, let’s just say that our plans have great confluence within the emerging new mobile app-scape.

Take a look at this post about Android apps and consider yourself put on notice that the future of mobile radio is not controlled by any means within the domain of Apple. No, not only is Android emerging, but we’ll also see Blackberrys and Intel MID devices competing to do pretty much the same thing.

Watch for us to be ready with radio apps for all devices, with the already developed phone app making cellecasting a compelling solution for every last phone on the planet for accessing news, talk, sports and all spoken word radio.

I had a great time at Forecast 09 last week in New York. Most of what we all talked about was top secret.. no not really, but it was certainly a great event for radio executives. Here is a picture of Eric Rhoads and I yucking it up at the cocktail party afterward. We all had a great time here at the end after a full day seminar dealing with how terrible the economy is right now.

I am just glad to have been in the minority in attendance with a viable solution. Many people in radio are really caught up in the problems in the economy right now.

BTW, for the few radio people who don’t already know it, we are proud to have Eric on our advisory board, as we are putting together an alliance of radio leaders to help the industry succeed amidst the consumer transition to using mobile devices for radio and other media consumption. If we pull together, we can align with consumer trends and make radio bounce back in a hard V, versus a soft U.

CELLECAST CELEBRATES LISTENERS WITH ‘HOLIDAY PARTY’

‘Talkback’ Feature Allows Participants to Share Holiday Thoughts and Memories

This holiday season, CelleCast CEO Andrew Deal is expressing appreciation to users of the CelleCast service, a format which allows listeners to access a variety of radio programs on demand from any phone. “I want to reward our listeners, both old and new, for the support they show CelleCast,” said Deal. The reward, he says, comes in a virtual listener “Holiday Party,” and a variety of exciting Christmas gifts.

Through CelleCast, program partners find convenient and interactive ways to provide access to radio segments. CelleCast listeners are also able to submit instant feedback, called a “Talkback,” which is routed directly to the programming source. At the “Christmas Party,” listeners will also be encouraged to share holiday thoughts and memories using the Talkback feature, which will be featured on a program channel of CelleCast. December 8 - December 24, CelleCast staff will review the stories and choose the best, whose contributors will receive a $100 shopping spree from the CelleCast catalog.

Existing listeners with active profiles will “open their gifts” via notices through audio messaging on the CelleCast service, and web prompts when they log in to their user profile.

CelleCast, Inc. was launched in November 2007 to bring premium talk radio to any phone, anytime, anywhere. Its current partner networks include Premiere Radio Networks, United Stations Radio Networks, Advanced Media and Envision Radio Networks. CelleCast offers an interactive experience including playlists and social networking profiles, the ability to share favorite radio clips with friends via CelleGrams, and programming feedback through the Talkback feature.

Programs include:
The Lou Dobbs Show
The Dr. Laura Program
Make it Happen with Mel Robbins
The Todd Feinburg Show
Paul Shaffer’s Day in Rock
Family Matters with Caroline & Jacquie
This is America with Jon Elliot
Into Tomorrow with Dave Graveline

CelleCast now offers the CelleCast Mobile site to better serve the growing number of mobile web users.

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Yeah, I know this has nothing to do with cell phone radio, but we’ll connect it all under the banner of citizen journalism.

Today i was flying home from JFK via Long Beach California on their flight 215. Midway through the flight after the captain announced they were having trouble a few times with pressurization, another announcement came over the speaker after 3 hours in the air that we needed to land in Rapid City South Dakota as a precaution.

As annoying as this was generally, my geographical obsessions kicked in a bit I wondered how we also drifted so far north. Take a look at this normal aviation flight map that shows the track between New York and LA:

We should have been flying over Kansas, not South Dakota.

What gives Jet Blue? I and a bunch of annoyed fellow travelers want to know why we were two states off track from a straight shot to LA. We could have been to Denver by that time, and the fact that we flew around for 45 minutes just to lighten the weight of fuel seems a bit odd.

I pulled out of the circus this time, am staying the night in Rapid City tonight. I’ll fly home to PDX on Frontier tomorrow AM. ironically, I’ll have to fly due south to Denver first.

Jet Blue, we want you to respond to this and tell us what you are going to do to make us whole. I was told the entire $350 I have to pay to get home is under question. It is costing me more to get home safely and HONESTLY, when it is customary to be made whole by the airline in this case.

Since we first started to see the trends come together calling for the need for radio to go mobile, and to get “TiVO-ized”, we have been fighting for more than the success of our particular solution, but for the culture of radio and media in general to embrace new platform innovation. In the last two years, the big question was whether radio should fortify against new media innovations, or whether it should stake some claims in the new media frontier. The option of leading the culture into the future was not even discussed, which is a big reason radio has a perception problem to overcome.

Well, as predicted, we now see that any argument for taking the fortress approach is rapidly losing supporters, and in it’s place, radio leaders are beginning to look into complementary platforms as a way to future-proof the viability of radio. Actually, I state the latter not because we are seeing major movement in that direction as of yet, but because the language is shifting away from last years untenable arguments. For one thing, the fears of cannibalization are rapidly dissipating, as new digital distribution experiments are not drawing the ire of affiliates as first cautioned. Now, I don’t refer to radio’s slow turning toward new ideas as a slam in any way. Regular readers here know that our respect as newcomers to the radio industry is profound, and we have been outspoken against what I like to call the new media detractors of radio, who on one day slam radio as an industry, and on the other hold out their hand and expect to cut deals with networks in hopes of an eventual supplanting. This “podcast expo counter-culture” truly only deserves to remain in radio’s giant shadow.

But how will the radio industry venture into the new without diminishing it’s successful core position in the minds of the consumer? To that we provide a carefully considered Platform Diversity Strategy, that first protects radio’s core content assets, assures against cannibalization, and most of all, expands branding and monetization. We are basically fighting for, and appealing to our friends in the industry to do, is to be deliberate and strategic about new platform opportunities. Doing so will be well perceived by radio consumers, shareholders, vendors and observers alike. Good leadership points will be scored as well.

So, to the point of this post, the prediction of an near term expansion of media platform diversity. I just found an article today about the work television leaders are doing, titled: Network Execs Wrestle With Multiplatform, Time-Shifted World. The compelling quote within it that should bring additional comfort to us in radio is…

“It’s early days still, but the good news is that multiplatform exploitation seems to expanding audience, not cannibalizing it,” said NBCU Digital Distribution president J.B. Perrette.

When this kicks in, it will kick in quickly. Together we can lead this change, or tomorrow you can follow it. Let’s build alliances to help radio rebound well in 2009, not by reacting, but in leading.

Andrew.