Andy Nulman & Garner Bornstein, Airborne Entertainment

Comedy, like brain surgery and dog grooming, is best left to the professionals. Andy Nulman (left) and Garner Bornstein, pros from the worlds of entertainment and technology, have pooled their knowledge of the human condition and the human interface and come up with just the thing to bind us ad infinitum to our wireless devices: Airborne Entertainment.

Airborne creates, aggregates and distributes games, humor, trivia and “edutainment” to mobile devices over WAP. They call it micro-entertainment. In the works for two years, the company's PocketBoxOffice service now provides more than 80 different micro-programs to mobile devices across North America.

As a steady companion for diversion — an all American pastime if there ever was one — a wireless device could become less utilitarian and more like an electronic security blanket or an imaginary friend. “We compete with boredom,” CEO Bornstein said. “We're not looking to entertain for an hour. We're looking to kill 10 minutes of your day.”

The company has distribution deals in place with virtually every major wireless carrier in North America and with content providers in both North America and Europe. The company's Buzztime multiplayer trivia game alone generates 750,000 minutes per month on the Sprint PCS network.

To Nulman, Airborne's president and the former CEO of Just For Laughs, one of the world's largest comedy festivals, wireless entertainment is just like producing a TV show. “People don't buy the satellite or the signal or the chip. They buy the program,” he said. “They will determine what works and what doesn't. To me, that's entertainment. It's just the screen that has shrunk.”