NET9: Four Years, And Still Growing

Four years ago today, I had a vision that mobile devices and the software and services that power them would be a very big part of humanity's future. Throughout the many months, the NET9 idea has proven to be correct and the path we take from here on still feels right to us. However, I also believe that in order to visualize the future, one must revisit the foundations made in the past.

Year One: Self-Discovery

Our first year was a very big learning experience. How blogging worked and all the things we could do with it. The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet was the cornerstone of many of our mobile news posts, and is still functional to this day. It was this year that we discovered that the Internet on mobile devices was the future and we were excited about the fathomless possibilities that would come from it.

Year Two: Making The Future Happen

Into the second year, we decided to be part of the mobile movement, and solid.gold.code was born. We made many cool new friends and even a few enemies somehow. We predicted that the touchscreen was going to be huge in the near future, and found ourselves distracted by the many time-consuming activities being created for the whole "Web as a platform" blitz. The Nokia N95 3G was added to our mobile device family, and changed the way we looked at phones forever.

Year Three: Time For Games, Time For Change

In 2008, our third year running, we got a little attention from Nokia and were presented with lots of opportunities and motivation to continue to grow our ideas. N-Gage was a big focus as we began to have a lot of mobile gaming fun. We lost ourselves a little that year, but we changed quite a bit toward the end. Little did we know, there was so much more change to come in 2009.

Year Four: On The Move...

This year has been amazing, to say the least. We traveled a lot this year. Physically and mentally. Our journeys helped us realize the importance of mobile navigation and other location-based mobile technologies in the near future. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Nokia N97 were brought into the NET9 experience, and N The World was created from our travels.

The year is almost over, but our journeys with NET9 are just getting started. We have learned a lot about how mobile technology can enrich and even improve our lives. We can't afford to forget what we have learned from our good experiences with the mobile devices we use every day, and we have an obligation to ourselves and others like us to build solutions to the bad experiences we have with these same devices. We must not forget that this technology is merely an extension to what we are already capable of as human beings. We will continue to make the technology do so much more, and we will always find much more to do with it as well.

We've seen where we were, and we think we know where we're going. We hope you've enjoyed the ride so far. We've got a lot of ground to cover. 2010 will be a big year, and we're ready for it...