Esato celebrates 10-year anniversary

This month, World Wide Web celebrates 20 years. Esato is not that old, but the Esato web site has existed in half of those twenty years. In 2001, goto.com, go.com, netscape.com was more popular sites than Google. Even passport.com (remember Microsofts login service?) attracted more visitors than Google did. Wikipedia was founded in 2001 but Skype, MySpace, Facebook, Podcast, Flickr and Twitter was still unknow web sites and services.

Esato is one of the oldest mobile centric web sites still around. We started up before iPhone, Android, Sony Ericsson, Windows CE and tablet was even though of. We have changed focus from being a site offering free ringtones and wallpaper, and later Sony Ericsson themes to being a site bringing daily news from the ever changing mobile phone world. Back in 2001 mostly offline feature phones was sold such as the Nokia 3210 which sold in 160 million units alone. But PDAs and more advanced smartphones started to emerge.

My entry into the mobile phone world happen when the company I worked for in Norway was awarded the job to create Telenor's WAP portal. We got our hands on the first Symbian powered smartphone entering the country, the Ericsson R380. Telenor wanted a way to demostrate what this new WAP thing was to their customers. I created the Wapalizer WAP emulator in perl which converted WAP pages into browser friendly HTML pages viewable on a desktop browser. I set up Gelon.net to host the Wapalizer and it was soon sold to UK based Fortunecity to join Wapdrive as the forefront to the mobile web. I left Gelon but wanted to do something similar and therefore started Esato.

Esato would not have been what it is today without the contribution from the forum community. A big thanks to all of them. We should especcialy honour our moderators: First was jh67 from Denmark, he is now editor of Zoom photography magazine in Denmark. Then came tranquil, a very friendly guy from Norway. GOwin and arnoldc are both from the Phillippines. I had the pleassure to meet both of them and several other members during a one month island journey several years ago. Their acquaintance saved me a lot of trouble when we where about to leave the country and the 21 day visa had expired. It was also a memorable moment to join an eyeball meating with many Phillipino members back in 2002.  We also have Cytech from Sweden, the home country of Ericsson. The two currently most active moderators are masseur from Australia, now living in England and tranced from the Dominican Republic. All moderators has done a tremendous job to keep the spammers away and removing unwanted content. As you can see, our moderators and members are from all over the world. We currently have more than 214.000 members and we will shortly reach 3 million posts about mobile phones. Congratulations to you all!

Esato has sold ringtones and video clips, been running a smartphone app store but those sources of income did not have any future. We are now relying on Google Adsense for making the money needed to run the site.

Esato early years: