Howdy everyone! Since we're approaching our one-year anniversary in May, we thought we'd give you a few quick updates on what's happening in the world of Bitmob, from what we're working on now to very vague hints about what we're working on next.

By now, we've smoothed out a lot of the problems from launching Bitmob 1.1. You now have a much (much!) faster and nicer article editor and a few more minor improvements throughout the site (like a better presented Mobfeed, where all community-made articles appear).

We still have a few bugs that not everyone will see or experience -- we're working on those! (Send your tech-related complaints to support@bitmob.com.)

We're also about to start development on Bitmob 2.0, which we are positive will excite all of our members. Bitmob 1.1 was mainly a bunch of really nice tweaks and improvements, whereas 2.0 will introduce actual new features. 2.0 will get our users a lot more involved, and assuming it all comes together like we hope, it'll be even more rewarding for you to be a part of our community. It's not what we think you might be thinking, either -- we haven't seen anyone do what we're planning yet.

Now, don't get too excited yet -- everything's going to take a bit of time. We still have a lot of work to do and really no money to do it other than a few dollars from advertising and donations, plus what money fellow Co-Founder Demian Linn and I have put in ourselves from our personal savings. So it's going to take extra time as we do things on the cheap, with the help of all the people that have kindly volunteered their free time and services to us.

Our main problem is that we don't have a full-time, salaried staff to help us with things like sales, ad operations, biz development, and other business matters. So we pretty much do everything ourselves, trying to grow Bitmob to the point where it could be a full-time, profitable company.

The good news is, we're well on the way there. Traffic's been tremendous lately, and Bitmob's becoming a bigger and bigger presence in the industry. We're just finishing up some budget stuff now, so we'll be ready to talk to investors very soon about what we've done in year one, and what we have the potential to do if we had some angel or seed funding to hire a real staff. (If you'd like to get in touch with us about any of this, you can reach us at letters@bitmob.com...maybe with an "Attn: Shoe" subject head!)

We definitely want to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your help in getting us to where we are today. Whether it's a simple click, letting your friends know about our site, or full-on posts to the Mobfeed, we appreciate everything you've done to grow Bitmob.

Please stay tuned, because we're only getting started.

P.S. The first issue of the new EGM is out now -- please check it out! Although we haven't started our full-time contract work with them yet (that'll happen when they launch their website), you will find some of goods in there. Look for a column from me, a Metacritic piece by Evan Shamoon, and a retro article by Kris Pigna (plus the cover story by Michael Donahoe, but that had nothing to do with Bitmob). You might see a few familiar names from the Bitmob staff doing reviews here and there, too, between the print and digital (EGMi) issues....