The WeatherBug SVP shares his experience of being blindsided by technology. Take heed.

This weekend, I had to take my son William to his Lacrosse match at the same time the University of Connecticut was playing George Mason University in basketball.

For those of you who follow NCAA Basketball's "March Madness" tournament, you know the huge news of the week: George Mason, a no-name commuter school, is knocking out both recent NCAA champions and 2006 heir-apparents like so many bowling pins. Given their new-found notoriety I was actually embarrassed to learn a couple weeks ago that the campus of this Final Four Cinderella phenom is no more than 10 miles from my office. That's how little known they are. Their immediate geography, plus the fact that they are an incredible human interest story, has made me an instant, rabid, fan.

This explains why I TiVo'd Sunday's Mason vs. UConn game. I had no problem missing the big game. You see, I am well-rehearsed at the task of "not finding out the result." In this area, I consider myself a true expert.

After setting my TiVo, complete with extra time in case the game went into overtime, I went to my son's Lacrosse field and spent two hours carefully isolating myself from any other human being who looked remotely like they had a way or a desire to follow the game and hence spoil the suspense of finding out the result before I could plausibly see it "live" later in the day. Eagle-eyed, I avoided anyone with radios, and I avoided groups of men talking. In fact I avoided people in general for fear of catching a whisper of a result. I even took the step of volunteering to take stats, which left me ensconced behind the player's bench-- and a full field's width away from all spectators.

I was safe.

Then it happened. A child rotating out of the game ran from the field to the bench and immediately produced a cell phone from his sport bag. I'm sure I subconsciously thought he was texting a friend, or calling his mom to let her know the Lacrosse match was delayed (which it was). No, he was pulling up the result, the dreaded score, the outcome…

"Hey! George Mason beat UConn!"

Too late. My hands were not fast enough to cover my ears. In an instant, a mobile device ruined the suspense of perhaps the greatest upset I would ever see in my lifetime.

Remember: I have spent years perfecting the art of "not finding out the result." I know every nuance of watching the big game tape-delayed as though it is live: keep the car radio off, don't look at the TV until the recording starts, warn family not to say anything, steer clear of the stray TV someone might have inadvertently left on, warn friends, don't answer the phone, don't let the VCR pause button "time out" in case it happens at that unfortunate instant that the score is revealed on live TV. I know all the tricks.

But then I never factored in the dreaded mobile device. Only if you love sports at their pinnacle like I do, will you understand how inexorably crushed I was.

The suspense spoiled anyway, I pumped the youngster for more information: He told me about the score, the stats, the last second shots, the near misses, the overtime, the buzzer beater. He might as well have been at the big game-- but only moments before he had been playing Lacrosse.

The next day a picture covered half of the front page of the newspaper showing euphoric George Mason fans celebrating victory in the stands. Examining it, what did they all have in common besides hysteria, body paint, Mason-colored green and gold wigs and arms outstretched in delight?

Cell phones. They all had cell phones in their hands. Some even had two. I should have known.

I actually feel better for having shared my misery with you, but I also wanted to make a point. A lesson for all of us I guess is this: Most reading this will probably sense they've got a pretty reasonable take on where the internet is taking us. We make our living doing it, and fancy ourselves for our successes and our hearty grasp on the digital world.

But the digital world is just a big baby, growing up before our eyes at an amazing clip. Those of us who thought the internet, and our collective digital industry, is land-locked to big, cumbersome desktops, laptops and local wireless networks had better beware. Your business success may very well depend on it.

That's all I have to say. I will be watching the Final Four live this weekend.

Andy Jedynak is the senior vice president and general manager of WeatherBug, which is owned by AWS Convergence Technologies Inc. Jedynak began at AWS in 1999 and is responsible for the WeatherBug business unit. He has directed the growth of WeatherBug from a concept in 2000 to become a top online weather property in 2003. Prior to joining AWS in 1999, Jedynak spent nine years at NBC working within a number of disciplines, including manager of new media.