Mobile Radio Simplified. Accessible. Relevant.

We are proud to announce the addition of “Advice Line” to the CelleCast lineup along with the recently highly publicized “Be Still and Know” audio meditation exercise.

The Foundation of Human Understanding was established by Roy Masters as a religious organization dedicated to assisting anyone interested in perfecting their spiritual natures through the principles of Judeo Christianity. For over 44 years, the FHU has reached millions of listeners with radio programs such as “Advice Line,” currently carried on over 130 stations in the U.S. and rebroadcast worldwide via the internet.

Now with CelleCast, Advice Line is now interactive for all who wish to participate.

from their website.. how they are promoting their cellecast

Be Still and Know is a new kind of program for CelleCast, in that it is not a series of ongoing radio episodes, but rather a single audio exercise in 2 parts where listeners are encouraged to return multiple times a day to meditate regularly. This makes a persons cell phone a great personal development tool in an unprecedented way.

We made a few adjustments to how we deliver programs with less than 4 episodes. We took out the prompts that alert the user to the episode date since that is not relevant.

We also hope to see listeners using the talkback and cellegram features on CelleCast to declare personal progress and to spread the word to others in need.

Advice Line with Roy Masters

One of the key founding values of CelleCast is to empower people to not only get more from radio on demand on their mobile phones, but also to speak TO the media and to have their voices heard. When we learned of the repression of reporting in Tehran not only of journalists, but of citizen reporting by the shutting down of internet resources as well, I knew that we should open this channel for the people of Iran. I only wish I did so a week ago. Let them try to shut down an entire bank of phone numbers! All anyone has to do is to dial 001 (415) 707-3003 from their mobile phones or landlines anywhere in the world and tell the truth of what is going on in Iran. We feel a viral campaign to get this number into the hands of people in the streets in Iran will be as easy as the system is to use. For every Iranian savvy enough to record and post video and pictures with their mobile phone, I’ll bet there are 50 who would dial up our number and make their own radio report if they felt there was a sympathetic audience on the other end.

I am calling upon all our radio partners to share this channel with their audiences! They should not think of it as competing with their own phone number, as what I need them to do is to simply tell their audience to text the number to friends and relatives in Iran as well as any Iranian who wants to share their voice.

We hope to gather hundreds of voices in the next few days and will continually alert the media of the talkback publications on CelleCast. The raw audio can be heard on our twitter timeline and we expect a whole lot of retweeting to take place.

Although not overtly political, our blog is all about our efforts in enabling passionate voices that are crying out to reach people in new and exciting ways. Therefore, with all the Tea Party business going on and the rising groundswell of a new protesting generation, we feel it is a good time to introduce the new CelleCast citizen reporting tools we have been working on this year. The Tea Party movement is young and full of new passionate voices looking for ways to empower ordinary people to speak their mind and be heard.

Largely dismissed by the mainstream media, this movement is organizing mostly online through Twitter, Facebook and new video sites like PJTV. Talk Radio is playing a strong role as well, and altogether, there will be over 500 Tea Party protest rallies tomorrow nationwide. The need for tools that can go into the hands of people and turn them into reporters as well as simply giving them a way to vent is obvious. Talk Radio can only receive one screened caller at a time, and by my estimation, there are thousands more than don’t just want to blog or write tweets, etc. They want to speak. They want to be heard, and there is a heightened sense of frustration that they are being ignored by a disconnected elite class at the top.

Enter CelleCast.

Starting tomorrow, what we specifically have to offer is the ability for people standing in the crowd to be able to call in and record field reports on what they are seeing happen at their local Tea Party. We looked for a good partner to work with in this effort, and discovered that Pajamas Media was making headway in its call for citizen reporters. Well it was natural, and it was overnight, but we joined forces with them to enable their still growing list of hundreds of citizen reporters to post field reports using their cell phone. Check out the Tea Party Coverage Program on CelleCast.

Anyone from around the country will be able to hear the reports after a basic screening, and the best will be included on Pajamas Media comprehensive coverage. People calling in can also hear the reports and post audio comments to them as Talkbacks, which is similar to posting a comment on a blog post. All opinions are welcome. The posts will update various Twitter statii as well, making for a sort of audio petition ideally, pushed out in real time, but also retrievable and sharable in various ways. We are hoping the CelleCast contribution will help make a difference in terms of the people being heard, and that is reward enough. We are not taking sponsors for this program for tomorrow, as we feel that this is our chance to contribute to increasing the national dialog.

LOU DOBBS RADIO SHOW GOES MOBILE WITH CELLECAST
The show, the first of United Stations Radio Network lineup to cellecast, is now available through any phone on demand

(JUNE 3rd, 2008) – The Lou Dobbs Show, weekday radio program syndicated by the United Stations Radio Networks (“USRN”), has signed an exclusive distribution agreement with CELLECAST, to deliver the program to listeners 24-7 from any telephone.

CelleCast has created a service that gives listeners flexibility with their radio listening and empowers them to set their own on-demand listening schedule. Now listeners all over America will be able to access Lou Dobbs compelling program any time they want with any standard cell phone. In addition, CelleCast users experience unprecedented interactivity with program hosts, advertisers and other listeners.

Andy Denemark, EVP/Programming for USRN, said, “We’re excited to add CelleCast as another easy to use resource to listen and interact with The Lou Dobbs Show.” He continued, “We’re no longer in a single-platform broadcasting business; we’re in a multi-platform media business, and we’re thrilled to be adding this additional mobile platform. It helps us reach our audience and, perhaps more importantly, for them to reach us.”

“Having America’s Most Influential Independent Voice as an exclusive channel in the CelleCast Network is a big boost for mobile interactive radio to flood the mainstream,” said Andrew Deal, CelleCast founder and CEO. “As a long time and extremely well respected anchor, author, and speaker Lou Dobbs joins some of America’s finest radio programs on the CelleCast system.”

Once again, we are proud and grateful for the upbeat and accurate portrayals in the press today.

RAIN Newsletter
http://textpattern.kurthanson.com/

Hear 2.0 Mark Ramsey’s audio interview also included
http://www.hear2.com/

There has been a great deal of excitement over our new look and feel that are coming along for the ride with our official launch today. Lots of changes and improvements planned since June were finally made live. The service plans, the e-commerce, the cell carrier petition, the special pages for our industry guests.

Now CelleCast.com is officially open for business and the Lars Larson show not only can be heard on CelleCast, but the Lars Larson cellecast will be promoted hourly to his audience.. The beginning of a great partnership with Westwood One.

I love history. And as we dig deeper and deeper into the roots of the services we see trending into great viability in the 21st century, we are finding comforting references to the use telephones from its early days as an entertainment device.

The Electrophone pre-dates radio itself. It never caught on in the US for various reasons, primarily because the infrastructure for radio in the 1920’s emerged and eclipsed telephony as the best way to broadcast news and entertainment.

Even though we have scarcely seen the application of telephones as mass media devices in 80+ years, the trends are coming back around to where it all makes sense — again.

Enjoy the article and remember… there is nothing new under the sun, just new ways to combine the things we know and learn about.

Although their contracts have been in place for some time, The Ray Lucia show, The Good Stuff and Into Tomorrow with Dave Graveline are now our initial programming partners and can be enjoyed daily via CelleCast. Not to mention Westwood One’s Lars Larson Show, which is in effect as of today!

We are working on dialing up a few options in the direct dial for each and helping both shows load up commercial free for all CelleCast subscribers.

The recent warnings regarding radio’s impending death serve as a great shot across the bow to get content producers thinking about how to diversify their platform offerings. Beyond that, radio will always have a place in our cars and not be phased out like uhf. I am not saying the future of the stick itself will grow, it will diminish, but it will be a slow erosion. The delivery side is what is diminishing, the production requirements are merely changing.

What this means to all in the industry is that they should look at new alternative delivery platforms that have the best chance of diverting their core listeners from their listening routines, and make deals with the best of them. Dismissing them is fatal. Instead, measure the value of the alternative platforms based on these guidelines:

1. Is it universally accessible? Don’t sweat over portable gadgets or cell phone downloads that require a purchase or early adopter (Gen Y) knowhow. These will never replace radio. Stay away from brand and device dependent solutions as well.
2. Can you promote it on the air? This is overlooked, but ties into the first point. You will never promote something that is available to a minority of your audience, and some minority faction of your audience will not derail your show if it is worth listening to. Podcasting is marginal.
3. Can 55% of your audience figure out the alternative method after a single try, and enjoy it? This one speaks for itself.
4. Does the alternative platform make a strong case for user acceptance? Having a tweaky add-on of images or special features like outtakes and exclusive messages is not enough. The alternative must give the user a real sense of empowerment.
5. Can you profit from it? The alternate MUST not be a competitive element of course, and you can do better than just creating a revenue neutral alternative. Let the new tool open up your markets to new listeners. Also, there has to be a real win-win between the producer and the delivery partner. Satellite alienated radio, allowing itself and it’s audience to be isolated by mainstream radio, which helped neither.

These are thoughts I share on a regular basis in various conversations as we tell the CelleCast story. The new issue of Talkers Magazine has quite a few quotes and references that point to the acceptance of CelleCast and other new platforms:

Radio & Records CEO: Radio is being beaten in the portability dept. “I think the captains of the industry…should concern themselves with the portability of AM and FM radio…”

Geoff Rich: “Talent will always find the easiest path to get to their audience…they’re going to figure out how to do it themselves.”

Bill Brady: “The radio industry is at a crossroads…the market is telling us something. We should listen.” (speculatioin amidst radio’s negative revenue growth)

The flavor of these comments indicate that enough big minds in the industry are aware of the need to change their traditional business models or face even more revenue loss. They’re slowly beginning to see the importance of getting on board with things like CelleCast.

I love these kinds of mobile media projections.

It comes from PricewaterhouseCoopers

Now, with all the push to mobile, I am glad we are here to make sure people can enjoy the audio portion of all this. And we here at Fourth Speaker agree with the takeaway:

“Make more deals and make them fast. It’s all about creating new relationships to accommodate the shift towards media convergence and address increased fragmentation as well as the proliferation of intellectual property issues“