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Future of Media Summit blog: Mark Pesce on iPhone phails, Tom Abate on future of journalism, insights from other speakers and participants…

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Every event we do, we run a blog for all speakers and participants. Since Future of Media Summit 2007 we’ve maintained the Future of Media blog on an ongoing basis, including my blogging activity on the future of media.

As we approach the Future of Media Summit 2008, the Future of Media Summit blog is taking off as a forum for fantastic contributions and ideas on the future of media. Summit speakers and participants are now posting, and we can expect some fantastic conversations on the event blog up to, during, and after the Summit next week.

Some recent highlighted posts with brief excerpts:

Mark Pesce on iPhail: A fantastic, detailed post on what is wrong with Australia’s iPhone plans.

Never in my five years in Australia have I seen such a complete failure in marketing. Three Australian telcos – Optus, Telstra and Vodafone – have the device. All of them have completely failed to recognize the pent-up demand for the device, and the way it will change network usage. This was revealed – beyond all doubts – in the way they released their pricing plans, and the specifics of those plans.

We could name our MVNO the Future AUstralian Carrier, or FAUC.

Don’t like your plan from Telstra, or Vodafone, or Optus? Well, get FAUC.

Yes, we’d still have to deal with Apple, we’d still have to promise them 10% of the operating revenues from iPhone, if we wanted to retail it on FAUC, but we could at least be completely transparent about our costs. Customers (that is, us) would understand where every dollar spent on FAUC went. That, in itself, would likely engender tremendous loyalty from the base of users – which would bring more users in, a slow tidal wave, as people abandoned the big-name carriers for a crazy mob of Australians who decided to do it themselves.

So… who’s in?

Mark Pesce (again) on Another Planet, Utterly Unlike Our Own.

This is the risk Disney takes when it uses old-fashioned business models in a thoroughly modern world. They may squeak by this time, and perhaps the next, but one day – and for the rest of time – that tactic will fail them. They’ll lose their market window, because they misunderstood the audience.

Tom Abate on Take me to your leader. Reflections from a life in journalism on where it’s going.

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