Thursday, August 18, 2005
Mobile Forum Access Now Open Everyone!
Posted by Jason Dunn in "UPDATE" @ 12:00 AM
If you've visited any of the three mobile sites in the past few days for Pocket PC Thoughts, Smartphone Thoughts, or Digital Media Thoughts, you'll have noticed something new: a small "Sponsored by" graphic featuring the Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded logos. Our mobile forums are now open to everyone, subscriber or not. This is something I'm tremendously excited about! :D This means people won't need to log in to read the content, and every article, post, and forum thread is fully consumable on their mobile device. This is something I've always wanted to enable, but given the amount of work Fabrizio did in optimizing the templates it was never an option to just give it away, so we kept it as a subscriber feature. Now that it has a commercial sponsor, everyone can take advantage of this. A very big thank you to the Microsoft Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded team for sponsoring our mobile site! :way to go:
So what if you're a subscriber who signed up just for the mobile forums? My hope is that you'll still see value in being a subscriber - the other features (ad blocking, media storage, email blasts, subscriber badge, and the warm fuzzy feeling you get by knowing you're supporting our work here) will continue to be subscribers only. ;-) I'm also going to be kicking off a new round of contests, including a new monthly giveaway sponsored by Pocket PC Techs where we'll be giving away several special accessory bundles every single month to subscribers! (and people who send me postcards) We're also looking at developing new subscriber features including full-text RSS feeds, and we have a simple (but useful) piece of software developed in conjunction with Two Peaks just for subscribers - you'll hear more about that next week.
Lastly, in the next 90 days or so we'll be merging the subscriber benefits from Pocket PC Thoughts and Digital Media Thoughts into one - meaning being a subscriber at any one site gives you an all-access pass. And that also means for those of you who've been waiting for Smartphone Thoughts subscriber benefits to be activated, this is it! We'll be tweaking a few of the benefits in the new configuration, such as getting one $20 Vaja coupon per year, not one per site (I have to pay for these after all). Overall though this change will give you even more value in being a subscriber.
Enjoy those mobile forums!
So what if you're a subscriber who signed up just for the mobile forums? My hope is that you'll still see value in being a subscriber - the other features (ad blocking, media storage, email blasts, subscriber badge, and the warm fuzzy feeling you get by knowing you're supporting our work here) will continue to be subscribers only. ;-) I'm also going to be kicking off a new round of contests, including a new monthly giveaway sponsored by Pocket PC Techs where we'll be giving away several special accessory bundles every single month to subscribers! (and people who send me postcards) We're also looking at developing new subscriber features including full-text RSS feeds, and we have a simple (but useful) piece of software developed in conjunction with Two Peaks just for subscribers - you'll hear more about that next week.
Lastly, in the next 90 days or so we'll be merging the subscriber benefits from Pocket PC Thoughts and Digital Media Thoughts into one - meaning being a subscriber at any one site gives you an all-access pass. And that also means for those of you who've been waiting for Smartphone Thoughts subscriber benefits to be activated, this is it! We'll be tweaking a few of the benefits in the new configuration, such as getting one $20 Vaja coupon per year, not one per site (I have to pay for these after all). Overall though this change will give you even more value in being a subscriber.
Enjoy those mobile forums!
