Last monday at the EGU General Assembly I demontstrated that you can turn an umbrella in a raingauge by glueing a small microphone on the umbrellas canvas. The signal of the microphone is sent to my iPhone by a bluetooth headset (the kind often used by taxi-drivers).
Rutger (LinkedIn/twitter)developed a prototype iPhone app (in a day!) that takes the audio feed coming from the Bluetooth headset, calculates how much dB it is and plots it on a nice graph for me to use in my demo. You can even email the data to yourself if you want.
A journalist from the BBC visited me at my poster and interviewed me. He wrote a very nice article on my work, which you can read here.
This research is done as part of my (one day a week) job at Disdrometrics and is funded by the European Research project WeSenseIt.
UPDATE other media are covering the story as well, mainly citing the BBC page. This one, and this one and also on popsci. PreventionWeb reports on it. Outsideonline also wrote a nice piece of my work, but called me "Dr Huf". I am also being interviewed on BBC (North Ireland) radio and Discovery Channel in Canada made an item on it. which you can only view from North America). Mashable made a nice short news video as well. The international section of Delft University Newspaper Delta wrote this nice piece on it
I was skype-interviewed by the American TV channel WFAA News (part of ABC). I also found a french site (creapills.com),a site aimed at chinese people living in the Netherlands (gogodutch.com) and this Italian site. Two Brazilian websites (1 and 2) reported on it. I had a very entertaining interview with New Zealand National Radio program This Way Up, listen here. For a list of all dutch media reporting on it, see this dutch blog post that I wrote.