Mobile Radio Simplified. Accessible. Relevant.

I am inspired to throw in a quick note today after watching this video on Mark Ramsey’s blog about what agencies think about radio today.

A couple of the points I especially liked were the references to windshield brands and the effective opportunities ahead as radio goes interactive. We have been looking at developing local advertising at this stage and proving this concept as valuable. National initiatives for large scale deployment have been a tough road, but we think we can get more marketing interest thrrough local tests like this.

More information to come. Contact me to discuss what we can do now for your brand in a local market.

Just wanted to let the world know that the blog silence has been deliberate during February, but lots of public posts are coming back in March. Even more posts will be directed to our tiered access layer to partners, advertisers and investors in CelleCast

The focus has been elsewhere lately, mostly with Twitter integration, which you will hear about very soon in a flurry of new announcements.

Thanks for staying tuned in to the future of radio here. We won’t disappoint, and we welcome the new inbound link from http://radio.alltop.com.

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.

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.

For the small screened among us, you can now enjoy the Fourth Speaker on the go on your mobile phone!

Just look for the sidebar link under the blogroll, or go here

I regret to report that over the weekend, we had some trouble with our audio files that did affect your experience with CelleCast. All of our files were not copied from our old server to our new server as we had hoped. Where the newer episode files were not in the right place as hoped, listening to that program would be a strange excursion indeed into date prompts with nothing there behind it. The problem has been resolved so all is well for this week and beyond.

The good news behind the bad news is that we expanded our storage capacity as we have so many new segments coming in daily, as we continue to grow in both content and listeners. We are dedicated to providing a service that scales, so the new storage server was brought online to stay ahead of our load.

Thanks again for enjoying CelleCast mobile radio on demand.

This post is offered purely for the enjoyment of old media rediscovery by new media.

Now, go respect your elders who rocked.

I’ve been telling friends and colleagues about CelleCast and the usual reaction is enthusiastic. Everyone seems to get it right away. What I find interesting is how some business people over think it. Initially I heard, “It won’t be high quality. But soon they were saying, “Then again it is talk which is exactly what phones are calibrated to do.” I also heard, “People won’t use their minutes to listen to shows that they can probably hear on the radio.” However it is clear we already pay to hear and watch shows on our terms and timeline. The next sentence is usually, “but I guess I am paying $9.95 a month for each DVR in my house, and that is on top of my other fees.”

Sometimes change is scary and the reaction is to over think and over analyze a situation. Some people will do that until the opportunity passes them by, but thankfully there are some innovators like the folks at the Dr. Laura Show and Paul Shaffer’s show and Dave Graveline and the growing list of CelleCast programmers who know a good thing when it hits them upside the head.

Amidst all the challenges of this time, no matter what happens, I am grateful I have had a chance to travel pretty well in my life. There are my favorite places. It took me a while to make this, BTW, so please read it.

1. Chennai (Madras), India
2. New York City, NY, USA
3. Lihue, HI, USA
4. Bangalore, India
5. Laguna Beach, CA, USA
6. San Diego, CA, USA
7. San Remo, Italy
8. Portland, OR, USA
9. London, England
10. Paris, France
11. Kochi, India
12. Poipu, HI, USA
13. Big Bear Lake, CA, USA
14. Mumbai (Bombay), India
15. Seattle, WA, USA
16. Vail, CO, USA
17. Perth, Australia

• Create your own travel map or travel blog
• Visit TripAdvisor.com

I had the honor to be on a panel at the Convergence Conference this week where the stated goal was to get down to the nitty gritty on ‘Revitalizing Stodgy Old Media’. Of course with any panel, there are many points to be made and moderator questions can create an unexpected context where the core issue loses some of it’s focus.

Mark Ramsey did a great job keeping things interesting, but surprised me a bit by defining the context of the session to identifying problems and solutions on the radio station and group level. No problem. We had a few minutes at the beginning to address the ’stodginess’ premise. I made the point that there is a droned narrative about radio’s backwards views on media that I don’t agree with at all. It is an unfair characterization, and as Mark also clarified, stodgy might just be another way of saying that radio is established and careful not to sacrifice it’s soul at the alter of ‘new’.

This brings me to the larger point I had hoped to bring across on the panel had we not moved on from the attitudinal to the practical. The point is that in my experience, new media types have issues of their own to deal with if we truly want to see convergence happen as it should to the benefit of all. New media has at times an unpleasant arrogance to it. There I said it. The idea that something new is categorically more valuable than something established makes as much sense as electing Barack Obama on the mere oratory of change alone. New media types expect to grow virally and replicate with impunity, but then come around to radio to exploit their mass reach.

Coming from the new media side, we have enjoyed much more success in convergence as we have sought to compliment radio and became students of the radio culture and mission. Not only has this been rewarding for me personally, but will reward us greatly as our partnerships continue to expand.