About Us

The most common question I (Joshua Steimle, founder of MWI) get asked about MWI is what the name stands for. Well guess what, it doesn't stand for anything.

Ok, here's the longer story. When I started my first agency it was called Mindwire Interactive, but mindwire.com was already taken, and mindwireinteractive.com was too long of a domain name while mindwireinc.com just seemed lame. So a quest was undertaken to find a domain that was relatively short and which sounded and looked good. MWI.com was not available, but the people who owned it didn't appear to be putting it to much use. An email was sent asking if they would be interested in selling it, but the answer was that "No, we still use the domain for email even though we don't use it for a website" and that was the end of that. At least that was the end of it until a few months later.

In time an email was received saying the domain was now available. When I asked how much it would be, expecting the owner to want $10-20K for it, seeing as how three-letter domains are quite rare and valuable, I was shocked when the response was "No, I'm not looking for anything, you can have it."

In 2003 when Mindwire was acquired and I set off to create a new agency, I retained ownership of the domain name mwi.com, but not the company name Mindwire, and so the new company name became MWI because, after all, if we've got this great domain we've got to use it.

Over the year we've received many suggestions, but we haven't been big fans of any of them. Sure, names like Mormons Whipping Immigrants or Maoists With Integrity are entertaining, but aren't the image we're after, and so the name continues to mean nothing. Perhaps it's the Seinfeld of corporate monikers.

Name-Related Incidents

Apparently there was a company a few years back called MWI Connections, amongst other aliases, that was running some type of credit card scam. We had a 1-800 number and would get several calls per week from irate individuals demanding that we refund the $86 we charged on their credit card. Evidently the smarter people went to mwi.com and figured out that we probably weren't the "MWI" they were looking for, and so only the less intelligent types got as far as calling us, because we had a devil of a time explaining to them that we weren't the MWI they were looking for, and that it was easily possible that there might be 200 companies in the United States using the letters MWI as part of their name.

In one extreme situation a caller didn't believe us and proceeded to call our entire client list, telling each of them how we were horrible people who had ripped her off. She was about half way through it when one of our clients called us to tell us they were getting calls from a crazy lady ranting about us charging her card for $86 and we were then able to contact her and put an end to it.

A second story has to do with a company called MWI Veterinary Supply. They're a much larger company than we are, and frequently their customers and indeed their own employees forget that their website domain and therefore their email addresses are mwivet.com, not mwi.com, which means that we frequently get email intended for persons at the company. These emails often include sensitive company information, and occasionally it gets personal.

The best email I got was sent to 15 or so individuals, one of whom evidently worked at MWI Vet, but the person sending the email had just put mwi.com instead of mwivet.com on the email address for that person. The email was regarding a bachelor's party for a certain guy, and it talked about going down to New Orleans for a few days and drinking, carousing, and generally hanging out with women of ill repute and easy morals. Just the type of activities in which I'm sure the fiancée would have been thrilled her husband-to-be could participate in. I could have just deleted the email, but I thought better of it and replied to all, saying something along the lines of "Hi, you've accidentally sent this email to me instead of your friend who works at MWI Vet. I've been intrigued by the content of your email, have done some research, and have forwarded it to your friend's fiancée. Cheers."

I didn't get any response.

Oh, so I guess this page is supposed to be about MWI, not just the name. Well, MWI is a Utah-based firm that provides services like web design, search engine marketing, SEO consulting and training, and search engine optimization. Want to hire us?