Day 1 of the Public Media 2008 conference in Los Angeles. The wise and cerebral Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, delivered his thoughts on the future for public media. For me, the key part concerned his comments on cell phones. He thinks they will be the new radios and televisions. “This will start to happen in a big way the minute Apple opens its iPhones to independent developers of native applications (rather than just ones that run in a browser).” Searls said the opening would probably happen in the next few weeks or months. A big development community was waiting. The process would get a huge boost when carriers started selling open phones developed on Android (Google’s open source mobile platform), OpenMoko, Maemo, Trolltech (Nokia just purchased it for $100 million) and other platforms — all Linux-based. The carriers would resist this development at first, Searls said, and complain about how much bandwidth was being used, “but they’ll deal with it because demand will drive supply, and openness will outperform the closed alternatives”. Searls suggested that selling wifi would become “the pay toilet business of the future”.