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.

But despite such gloomy reports, and the layoffs such as the one I survived last year, I see a ray of hope so powerful that I feel compelled to bring it to light. Newspapers can do what seems to be working for the Huff Post — they can report and write with more attitude, and in a symbiosis with readers as opposed to the prevailing pontiff-to-parishoner mode. And it’s a simple fix if we have the will — push the power to publish way down into the editorial ranks through blogs.

Elias Bizannes on Consumers want information, not “media”

The first step to progress comes with recognition new solutions are needed. The recognition bit comes on the back of the fact that online does information better than any other method. And it’s information consumers want – the medium that delivers that information is just that: a mechanism to deliver the end product.

The Future of Media blog gets a stack of readers, including both the speakers and participants at the Summit as well as a worldwide audience of people who are creating the future of media.

If you’re coming to the Summit, use the blog login you’ve received and contribute your ideas before and during the event (let us know if you haven’t got one yet). We also find that many more people start contributing after they attend the event, continuing the conversations they’ve started at the Summit.

Even if you’re not attending, we’d be happy to have you contribute – just drop us a line (fen at futureexploration dot net) and we’ll set you up with a login. Reposting relevant posts is fine – it’s good to bring the insights together.

I will keep you posted here on particularly interesting posts on the Future of Media blog from our speakers and participants.