Multitaskers’ new blessing

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.

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.

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