Can a phone kill an industry? What’s Qik offering, now that they’re in public beta? These are the questions we tackle on today’s Mashable Conversations.  Sean and I were both intrigued by the fervor and discussion generated around my recent editorial on whether I thought the iPhone would kill terrestrial radio. The response to the article was thunderous and inconclusive.  Just as many folks thought that I was right as thought that terrestrial radio has done a decent enough job of killing itself.

It’s a popular topic, too.  This weekend’s Elite Tech News show focused on this topic as well for a good portion of the program, and most of the panel disagreed with me on my hypothesis, though for a number of reasons ranging from Louis Gray’s opinion that no technology ever truly kills another to Steven Hodson’s proposition that mobile smartphone technology will never be truly ubiquitous.

Sean and I spend a good deal of time hashing out the various thesii put forth here and there before taking some time out to speak with Qik co-founder Bhaskar Roy about today’s launch of Qik into open beta status.

He told us about a number of new upgrades that come out with this version of the service, including what was most exciting to us, a number of new distribution partners.  As we’ve talked about before, CoverItLive now supports Qik (amongst a number of other live streaming services), but Qik is now partnered also with Facebook, MySpace and Orkut.

For the full scoop on all this, watch the podcast below, download the MP4 to your device, or subscribe to the feed.

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