This letter is addressed to all PhoneReport readers, visitors, members, advertisers, and contributors in general

At this same exact time, on the 30th January 2007, I had the honour of publishing the first post at the then Canal de Notícias Móveis (CNM), which was a web log that gave way to PhoneReport, and last year, to PhoneReport v2.0.

It was by myself that I started the web log, and published the first post at CNM. The web log was then hosted at a Portuguese web log provider, Sapo, but the posts were written in English language. There were no articles edited by myself, the website was rather an aggregator of mobile phone news.

As CNM began its transformation to PhoneReport, I decided to edit the articles, making sure that the readers also heard from my point of view. The website was, however, still a web log, and I wished to surpass that stage.

It was last year that my childhood friend Muhammad Hussein became my colleague, and joined in my quest. We acquired a server, which gave us more dynamic to open more websites, and increase the potential of PhoneReport and its communities.

By the time the transition had been completed, I had covered our first global launch, which was by Nokia, whom revealed four mobile phones: the 5800, 2600, 7070 Prism, and the 2600 Classic.

The new website was no longer a web log. It was a news portal with objective news, analysis, interviews, and reviews. PhoneReport v2.0 was born.

Our wishes to expand were fuelled by income from the web logs part of PhoneReport Communities, such as the Nokia N96 Blog.

Owing to time constraints, PhoneReport was receiving slightly less atention, which was not acceptable if we wanted to achieve our goal: "To become the largest telecommunications news portal in the web". A bit far fetched, but ambition has never hurt anyone...

From being a small one-manned website with less than 100 visits per day, we became a seven-men team with next-to 100 000 readers per month. We also rank in the top 55 000 websites in the world, according to Alexa web ranking. Once we glimpsed over the change in statistics, we began to believe that impossible is indeed, nothing.

Not everything was an easy-five-star-job. We did face an uphill battle at times, and had to overcome roadblocks along the way, press agencies who didn't wish to co-operate, hosting services which delivered a poor service, rendering PhoneReport down many times a day, and even failed projects, such as YaPhoneTube, a multimedia sharing website focused on mobile devices.

Christopher McFann, a.k.a. "christexaport", joined us in late September 2008. He brought his expertise from the Symbian-Freak forum, and serves as our Senior Analyst.

Shivam Malani became part of the PhoneReport team in October, and furnished our readers with daily news on the mobile industry.

Edward Umana is our Senior International Correspondent. He joined us in October, just three days after Malani joined us,  and as McFann, Umana also reports from the USA.

Alex Calva inaugurated our virtual office in Mexico. Calva reports as an International Correspondent.

Today I willl have the honour of welcoming a new member to our team. Aditya Singhvi is now PhoneReport's Software Expert. He will publish software reviews and provide us with his in-depth knowledge in the market. His introduction will be published later during the day.

Another announcement that we have prepared for today is the PhoneReport Forum. We have been testing it for over a month, and we believe it is ready to hit the spotlight. An official announcement will follow during the day.

Last, but not least, this is probably the most important part of my lettter, the acknowledgements. The first thought that comes to my mind when I think about our growth is WOM World. Without their support in terms of backlinks, we would not have the same rate of growth, or the motivation to continue our hard work.

A thank you to you!

My colleagues, Muhammad Hussein, Chris McFann, Shivam Malani, Edward Umana, Alex Calva, and Aditya Singhvi, also deserve a large part of mine,and PhoneReport's gratitude, as without their trust and dedication to this dream and goal, none of this would have been possible.

A thank you to you!

Public Relations agencies, news sources, and companies such as manufacturers and software developers also provided us with handset trials and software licences for us to be able to do our job.

A thank you to you!

It is a fact that we are celebrating our second anniversary only, we haven't won an Oscar nomination nor are we running for the presidency, but it also true that from every little achievement there is a dream and a goal, and we, I'm taking the liberty of speaking on behalf of PhoneReport when I say this, we have found our dream and goal.

A thank you very much to you all for your support over these two years, we hope to have you all with us in our future projects, which will be announced soon!

Yours faithfully,

Meraj Mahomed Anis Chhaya

Editor-in Chief

PhoneReport

 Print This Article