About Mobile Industry Review

Welcome!

Mobile Industry Review provides news and opinion to over 250,000 mobile industry executives and fanatics around the world. We provide a mix of news, original content and opinion across the mobile and wireless industries.

The team
The site is owned by founder and publisher, Ewan MacLeod who regularly posts, with support from this passionate and knowledgeable team:

– Adam Pothitos (our writer)
– Emma West (our Operations Manager)
– Sarah P (Top 7 Apps)
– Ben Smith (our 361 podcast editor)
– Rafe Blandford (key contributor to our 361 podcast)

Contact us
You can find our contact information on this page.

The background
The site, started on the 26th of January 2006, is the brainchild of mobile fanatic, Ewan MacLeod. A mobile industry entrepreneur, Ewan created and setup one of the country’s largest sms text to screen services in Nightclubs and bars across the UK (Neo One Impulse). Ewan was the first to program and launch picture messaging to screen back when the UK’s mobile operators were, it seemed, using sticky-tape to run their MMS gateways. An excitable, energetic chap, Ewan wanted the world to know about his team’s success with Impulse. Unfortunately the mainstream media didn’t want to know. Nobody cared. Mainstream journalists, often covering a wide area of the new media industry weren’t interested. Similarly, mobile coverage from mainstream media simply wasn’t good enough to provide Ewan and his colleagues with a good daily overview of what was ‘happening’ in mobile.

Already getting hundreds of newsletters and feeds from all sorts of sources to support his day to day business efforts, Ewan resolved to sit down once a day and document stories, news and opinion that caught his eye. He named the site SMS Text News because the focus was originally on text messaging. Let’s face it, during those years back then, what else was there? Rubbish handsets, rubbish mobile internet experience, rubbish MMS service… and text messaging. However, the site now covers a wide range of mobile spheres relevant to the executive and mobile fan, mostly with an eye on the end consumer — hence the new name Mobile Industry Review.

Read more about Ewan. Read an in-depth SMS Text News background piece by Ewan.

The audience
First, here are some statistics from our recent audience survey :

Where do you work
MNO/MNVO: 12%
Service provider: 13%
Mobile Marketing: 18%
Hardware Vendor: 3%
Related mobile industry services: 10%
Analyst / Investor: 3%
Media / Journalist / Blogger: 7%
Mobile fanatic: 36%

What’s your income level? (dollars)
< 50k: 39%
50-100k: 28%
100k+: 33%

What level are you working at?
Top level management: 28%
Mid level management: 36%
Making it actually work: 37%

How often do you visit?
Hourly: 19%
Daily: 53%
Weekly: 11%
Monthly: 3%
Now and again: 15%

How do you consume the site?
Web: 65%
Mobile: 22%
RSS: 51%
Daily newsletter: 17%

The site is monitored heavily by analysts, investors, mainstream media and other industry and new media blogs. Readers hail from all corners of the world, with a large UK, European and North American focus.

Audience size
This is a contentious subject for us, because, simply, we don’t know just how big our audience is. In January 2008, we tracked 350,000 unique hosts visiting the site and we use four different statistics packages to track our RSS and site visits. We’re unable to accurately measure the entire readership because our news feed is openly available, parsed and integrated into hundreds of web and private databases. We know we’re viewed by many large corporate intranets as we can often track the referring visits from them. We estimate our audience to be at least 250,000 per month, but in practice we suspect it might be much larger.

Reach
You’ve got audience size and then you’ve got ‘reach’. Or capacity-to-reach. How do you measure the value of, for example, the BBC phoning for a quote? Or the Financial Times taking quotes directly from our editorial? Or an A-Lister ‘liking’ or re-tweeting your articles?

How to contact us
We’re thoroughly interested in any mobile related news — whether it’s text related, a mobile application, mobile service or hardware. If you’re a start-up or small company operating in the mobile industry, we have a soft spot just for you — we’ll do our best to profile you and get the word out about what you’re doing.

Public relations professional? Relax — we’re PR friendly. Send us your release, or if you like, drop a note to Ewan or Emma and introduce yourself. We respect embargoes — please clearly mark them. Do remember that we generally operate on a London timeline.

We do get a lot of mail. If you haven’t heard from us or we’re appearing to ignore you, be assured we’re not, we’re just overloaded with incoming mail. Press refresh on our inboxes and woosh, another 3 pages of mail has arrived. So do give us a bit of warning if you’ve got a piece of news coming up.