Need to Text In the Rain? They've Got It Covered

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 that is 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."

Getting something done. Not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of walking in the rain. Getting somewhere quick, maybe -- or, for the more poetically minded, enjoying a stroll through the hazy tears of Mother Nature.

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, in their own Nubrella.