Ultimate conference schwag at Office 2.0
At last year's Office 2.0 Conference (which CNET sponsored), attendees were delighted to discover that the price of admission included an iPod Nano, cleverly preloaded with the conference schedule.
This year, organizer Ismael Ghalimi is raising the ante. All conference attendees get iPhones.
The phones will be part of experiment at the conference in Web-based group collaboration (the iPhones being, as we've said before, hardware for Webware), which Ghalimi explains on his site. Also, the logistics of ordering and shipping the phones to attendees is being done with Web 2.0 products and services, a Webware experiment unto itself.
Let's do the math here: Early-bird tickets to the show are $995. iPhones are $499 or $599 (attendees can choose the more expensive 8GB version for an additional fee). This makes the conference a relative bargain, especially if you can put the admission fee on your expense report. In which case, don't let your boss see this article. He or she might claim the phone as company property.
Journalists, bloggers, and other freeloaders don't get the phones.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
