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.
Demo fatigue set in early yesterday here at Webware HQ. After watching 13 five-minute demos back-to-back in the Launchpad session at the Web 2.0 Conference (or Summit, depending) with no break except for a brief stretch when one presenter's machine needed to reboot, it became hard to focus. But we've condensed the best and worst of the Launchpad session into a five-minute video. Plus: An exclusive peek inside the Web 2.0 Conference schwag bag!
In addition to our Web 2.0 Conference blog posts, News.com has a full rundown of news from the show, with even more video.
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