The M-Business story: this domain's first life, 2000–2002
If an old link brought you here — from an academic paper, a textbook, or a 25-year-old bookmark — you were looking for M-Business, the mobile-internet magazine that once lived at this address. The magazine is long gone. This page is its memorial, and the story of what happened next.
The magazine
M-Business was published by CMP Media, one of the big technology publishers of the era, during the first mobile internet boom — roughly December 2000 to early 2002. Its beat was "m-business": the idea, radical at the time, that commerce and work would move onto mobile devices. WAP portals, i-mode, SMS economics, Bluetooth, the 3G spectrum auctions, mobile payments — the magazine covered the whole gold rush, monthly, at exactly the moment the industry believed the mobile future had arrived a decade before the hardware could deliver it.
The archived structure of this site records around sixteen monthly issues, from December 2000 through March 2002. The article index reads like a time capsule of the era's obsessions: pieces on WAP and WML, Bluetooth's promise, the 2.5G stopgap, Europe's 3G licence hangover, lessons from NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, RIM and Palm's form-factor wars, mobile advertising rules, banks going wireless in Europe, the teenage SMS "killer demographic," and dispatches from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Finland and Iceland — the places the mobile future was arriving first.
What the magazine got right (and wrong)
Reading the article titles today is humbling in both directions. The thesis was correct — commerce, media and work really did move onto phones, more completely than even the magazine's optimists claimed. The timing was off by roughly a decade: M-Business was covering the mobile revolution on WAP-era hardware, and it folded — along with much of the tech press — in the dot-com winter of 2002, five years before the iPhone vindicated its premise.
The magazine left a genuine scholarly footprint: its reporting is cited in academic work on the wireless industry (including research on spectrum acquisition strategies) and in Pearson's textbook chapter "The M-Business Evolution." Those citations are why old links still point at this domain — and why we've preserved this page for them to land on.
A note on the original articles
We'd have loved to restore the archive itself, but two things prevent it: the article text was largely never captured by web archives (the site redirected to CMP's main portal for most of its archived life), and the editorial content belongs to the magazine's publisher and its successors, not to whoever holds the domain. So rather than republish what isn't ours, we've kept the map: the issue index, the topics, and the story. If you're researching the era, the Wayback Machine's record of this domain and CMP Media's corporate history are the places to dig.
What happened to the address
After the magazine folded, the domain led the itinerant life common to good addresses: redirected into CMP's network, briefly revived in the mid-2000s, then drifting through the hands of owners who used it for things we're happy to say had nothing to do with business journalism. In 2026 we picked it up and relaunched it as Modern Business Daily — a new, independent publication with no corporate connection to CMP or the original magazine, but with an honest affection for what this address once was.
We kept the spirit rather than the archive. M-Business covered a revolution in how business would be done — mobile, personal, available to anyone. The revolution we cover is the next one down the same road: one person, a laptop and an AI stack running a business that used to take a team. The December 2000 issue would have understood immediately.
The magazine was right: the future of business was in your pocket. It just took the future a while to ship.
Curious what this address is about now? Start with who we are, or the latest guides.