15 Years!

On September 9th, 1999, the origin story for Mobile Nations began when VisorCentral launched from my student apartment at University of Florida. Immediately the website became a fixture of the Handspring Visor online community by delivering high quality and reliable news, articles, reviews, and an active forum.

While today the Visor is a relic — I'm sure many of our younger readers have never even heard of it before — 15 years later we are stronger than ever delivering the same experience that made VisorCentral a success. Over the years we have navigated the many shifts in mobile platforms, and today Mobile Nations reaches over 32 million readers every month through Android Central, iMore, WPCentral, CrackBerry and our newest site, Connectedly.

From the early days of the revolutionary VisorPhone and Treo 600, the popular the Bold 9000, the T-Mobile G1, the AT&T Tilt, the Palm Pre, Windows Phone 7, the iPhone 4, the Galaxy S3, iPhone 5, BlackBerry Z10, Galaxy S5, it has been an amazing journey!

To achieve the kind of outstanding success Mobile Nations has enjoyed over the years has taken the efforts of many talented and passionate individuals. I've been blessed to be able to work among so many writers, editors, designers and coders who have all contributed to building Mobile Nations into what it is today. Our store teams have shipped over three million orders out the door and our volunteer forums teams have moderated over 15 million posts to date. Together, we have accomplished a lot, and I thank everybody who has played their part.

Our guiding principle throughout our history has been to focus on the needs of mobile users and build the kind of sites and communities that we want to visit and participate in daily. Priority number one for us has always been and always will be our readers. It's been an exciting 15 years and I'm confident the next 15 will be equally exciting. In all honesty, it feels like we're just getting started and there's still so much we want to do.

A Special Thank You to Our Members Who Have Been Here the Longest!

For a little fun on our 15th anniversary, I dove into our database of over 6.5 million registered members, and pulled out usernames of the first ten members that joined way back in 1999 that are still active today (they've all logged in within the last month to one of our sites). As a special THANK YOU, each of the following members will receive a $150 gift card which they can use anywhere and put towards the purchase of their next phone:

Dstrauss, monsieurms, jaytee, Trinition, Joe, Paladin, Mcevoys, kgilbertsen, jwbekens, Kris Gent, Xeron

Congrats and thanks for your patronage!

Leave a Comment For Your Chance to Win a $150 Gift Card!

In addition to recognizing our ten longest participating readers, we're giving away another ten $150 gift cards to our members. For your chance to win, simply login and leave a comment on this post. We'll be picking two winners at random from each of our sites, so feel free to leave a comment on this post on each of our sites to maximize your chance at winning. Open worldwide. You have until this Sunday, Midnight PST to enter and we'll announce the winners next week.

Good luck, and here's to the next 15 years! I hope continue to join us for the ride. It's going to be wild!

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