GottaKickit |
GottaKickit is a smoking cessation plan that uses your iPhone, iPod Touch, or Google Android-based mobile to help you break free of smoking without drugs, patches, potions, or even a whole lot of willpower. It costs less than a pack of cigarettes. It could literally save your life. |
New Years Day — 18 Years Later
On New Year’s Day 1991, Canadian software designer Nick Sullivan invented a method of quitting smoking that was exactly 18 years ahead of its time.
January 1, 2009: Having repeatedly tried to kick the habit himself, like many others Sullivan had found the repeated efforts brought stress but not success. Now he came up with what sounded like a possible solution: a computer program that could guide the user through a period of tapering cigarette usage leading ultimately to abstinence. Such a program would be comparatively easy to create. There was just one hitch. Even though consumer electronics had by then already been shrinking rapidly for more than twenty years, no computing device yet available was small enough, powerful enough, and above all popular enough to bring the smoking program to market.
For guinea pig purposes, however, there was the RadioShack PC-6, a $500 device that looked like a black steel check book half an inch thick. Though it made scant impression in the marketplace, the PC-6 was an early attempt at making simple business applications available in a hand-held unit. A few years later it would have been called a PDA. Crucially for Sullivan, among its built-in software was a version of the BASIC computer language, simplified but with just enough power to run his smoking program.
Several months later, now a non-smoker, Sullivan tucked his PC-6 away in the dark end of a deep drawer, and put it out of his mind. With no practicable platform for the software there was no way to bring his smoking plan, which he had dubbed GottaKickit, to the public at large.
As 2009 begins, a burgeoning category of devices much smaller than the PC-6 but millions of times more powerful has emerged. Mobile phones are everywhere, and mobile computers like Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch devices are spreading like wildfire. Change is all around us, yet the problem of cigarette addiction remains the same. People are still smoking, still trying to quit, and still failing, all in large numbers. The top 12-month success rate for any method of quitting, even under medical auspices, is a paltry 30 per cent — and that’s for those willing to undergo intensive counseling and a course of antidepressants.
But now smokers have one more solution to try, an old idea that’s finally getting its day in the sun: GottaKickit for Apple iPhone and iPod. In 2008 Sullivan teamed up with fellow Canadian and past business partner Chris Zamara, a veteran software engineer now making a career in Silicon Valley. With Zamara leading the software development effort, in-demand digital artist Ari Campbell came on board to design the product’s graphical interface. Campbell’s bold renderings dramatically exploit the color red, symbolizing both the burning cigarette and the courage needed to conquer it.
The GottaKickit software is now available to iPhone and iPod touch users through Apple’s on-line App Store. Readers wishing more information about the GottaKickit software or plan are invited to visit the product website, www. gottakickit.com.
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