April showers could continue clear through May, and your Burberry and your BlackBerry are already waterlogged. Perhaps you need a. Nubrella. Looking like a leftover set piece from Bubble Boy, the hands-free umbrella is marketed as the ultimate tool for the modern rained-upon. Folded up, it’s the size and shape of an Olympic regulation archery bow. Then you pop it . right . er, wait, how does this thing—ah well, you can always log onto nubrella.com for a tutorial, and get that baby open in five simple steps.Five? But my current umbrella opens in. But is your current umbrella the ultimate tool for the modern rained-upon? “Hands-free changes the whole game,” says Nubrella inventor Alan Kaufman, who was running Cingular outlets in Manhattan when watching his wired and wet customers struggle provided inspiration.Think of the 21st-century possibilities. No more one-handed texting. No more rummaging for the ringing PDA while trying to keep the groceries off of wet pavement. Chatting, waving, toting, umbrella-holding: four tasks that were never before simultaneously possible.The Nubrella is worn with a harness, and closes around its user like a clear, private cocoon, guaranteed never to turn inside out. It feels secure and oddly soundproof. Someone is going to try to go over Niagara Falls in this thing, and they might succeed.Progress! Or is it?The sleek umbrella has been around since Babylon and ancient Egypt—as seen in hieroglyphics—its ingenious engineering essentially unchanged, although man is a tinkerer. For centuries people have been trying to build a better umbrella. The US Patent and Trademark Office in suburban Crystal City, Virginia, has 97 on file from 2007 alone, 487 from 2002 on.Even the search for a hands-free umbrella is not new; the office has several applications on file going back to 1978. Kaufman is not concerned, because he thinks that previous products have totally missed the point of an umbrella. “There’s a very precise pitch on this product,” he says. It is: Way back when the Egyptians invented the parasol, it was meant to protect from sun, not rain, and no umbrella in history has ever achieved perfection.He believes so strongly in the Nubrella that he invested $400,000 of his own—and various family members’—money in the product. So far he’s sold about 500. But to look on the bright side, at least two buyers are extremely satisfied.“I saw it and I thought, now that is right on the money,” says Scott Novosel, who works for a golf instruction company in Kansas and encountered the Nubrella on display at a tournament. Novosel lived in Tokyo for six years and is something of an umbrella connoisseur: “The umbrella market is insane in Tokyo.” (Kaufman says Japan is one of his biggest markets.) Novosel likes that he can talk, text, e-mail, do it all, under his Nubrella, in the rain.Skye Grapentine of Youngstown, Ohio, bought the Nubrella for her birthday after stumbling across it online. She likes walking, and she likes catching up on reading the newspaper when she walks—a pleasure not possible with an umbrella. “With an umbrella, you’re busy gripping it,” says Grapentine. Hands-free is great because “the less you have to worry about, the more you can get done.”Hands-free umbrellas might have been knocking around the patent office for 30 years, but they are an invention meant for now, for a society obsessed with multitasking, for a society in which everyone is connected but everyone is isolated, in their own world, in their own bubble, their own Nubrella.-Monica Hesse (The Washington Post)
