Happy Birthday to, er, Us

Mobile Marketing Magazine is one year old today. We know that in blog terms, that’s not very old, but as we keep telling everyone, this is not a blog, it just looks a bit like one. It’s a good, old-fashioned, b2b magazine. It just happens to be online.
To celebrate the occasion, we will be entering as many text & win competitions as we can today, voting on any Reality TV show we can find, and watching 24 hours of Mobile TV. Anything to give the industry a boost.
At this point, we’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has supported us, through their positive feedback and encouragement, and in particular to our advertisers. One of these deserves a special mention. Incentivated has been with us since day one, and whatever they do in the future, their advertising and moral support has been invaluable in getting the site up and keeping it up. Incentivated MD Jonathan Bass was the only agency chief that really took an interest and asked to meet us when we first told the mobile marketing agencies what we were doing, and his, and his company’s, commitment to the site has been unwavering.
A few personal thank yous also to friends of the site who have helped with design, copy, and pointing out the stupid mistakes we make from time to time. In no particular order, these are Ashley Norris and Chris Price from blogging network Shiny Media, who encouraged us to put the site up in the first place, and answered countless dumb questions daily in the first few weeks. Long may Tech Digest, Bay Raider and all their other wonderful sites prosper.
IT expert and author James Wilson, who designed the masthead and helped solve the many initial teething problems, also deserves thanks for his patience and expertise. Thanks too to prolific freelance journalist, author and Miles Davis nut George Cole, who consistently forwards me information from companies whose radar we are not on yet, and chips in with the odd article. And never forgets my kids’ birthdays. To David Smith, who has also offered much, usually unpaid, help on the design front, but has at least been inspired to launch his own blog on toys. And to Jo Murphy, for help proofreading, in the days when we used to bother, and for acting as the voice of reason when I told her how much we were originally planning to sell the advertising space for.
Thanks too to our Guest Columnists, who consistently deliver clean, readable copy, without plugging their own company or product offering too blatantly. Usually anyway. And I can’t let the occasion pass without a nod of appreciation to Bruce Renny, insatiable Marketing Director of insatiable Mobile TV company ROK, who are never happy unless they are ruffling someone’s feathers, and always delight in telling us about it first. The mobile world would be a much duller place without them. A big thank you too to the PRs who take the site seriously and feed us with a stream of useful story leads on a daily basis.
And of course, finally, a big thank you to you, the readers for coming back day after day, week after week, giving us thousands of reasons to keep the thing going.
And while we’re on the subject of dishing out the plaudits, let’s also hand out a decent-sized brickbat to those wonderful people at Google, who refuse to list Mobile Marketing Magazine on their news alerts service, because it’s published by an individual rather than a company. As we’ve told them several times, this is not true, but hey, this is Google you’re talking to.
The first 12 months have been great fun. Here’s to the next.

David Murphy
Editor