Hollywood and the major record labels have always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with new media, alternating between roses and lawsuits for online entrepreneurs, if you will. Lately, it was looking a little like love was going to win. Hulu, after all, had convinced its detractors that even big dinosaurs can get things right, and record labels had started to embrace services like MySpace Music and Last.fm. But like an alcoholic who just can’t resist that drink, big media looks ready to relapse.

There’s been a lot of bad news out of the so-called Music 2.0 space this week, with Imeem said to be in financial trouble, and Last.fm forcing some of its subscribers to cough up around $4 per month. There’s also a storm brewing in the online video world, where some networks have started to take their most valuable content offline in order to maximize traditional revenue, and platforms like Hulu are being forced to fight any attempt to bring online content to the living room.

Record labels used to be something like the suicidal canary in the coal mine for Hollywood, eagerly moving from one life-threatening disaster to another.

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iPhoneDevCamp 2 took place in San Francisco this past weekend; one of the great things about the conference this year and last was the number of applications written by people who met there for the first time or who had no prior iPhone development experience.

Sometimes, the cleverest ideas and applications arise from these chance encounters, despite having only two days to come up with these applications.

Here are brief descriptions and a few screenshots of some of the nearly 40 applications developed or demo’d during iPhoneDevCamp 2. For a complete list, visit the iPhoneDevCamp 2 Web site.

Applications

• Converter: Karelia Software’s Dan Wood wrote this simple currency conversion application in 90 minutes.
• Fashion Season Collection: View photos and videos of haute couture fashion from the catwalk.
• Gifter: Demonstrates autofill in Web views in this gift-giving application.
• Heatmap Mobi: See what’s hot and what’s cold in your city.
• iRa: Easily the most impressive demo at iPhoneDevCamp, iRa takes mobile control and viewing of surveillance systems outside of the windowless, multi-monitor command center and puts them in the palm of your hand.

  

• Mapfoot: Find malls, stores and–most importantly–where you parked your car.
• My Emergency Info:Store and display emergency information.
• Quicktate: Stop listening and start reading your voicemail.
• Record-a-Call: Record and transcribe phone conversations.
• red:green: Have you iPhone voice your approval (green) or dismay (red) with this simple app.
• sStitch: A personal favorite, sStich provides citizens with the power to report disaster information. The developer showed how it was used to track a brush fire in San Diego.

  

• Substrate: Make pretty procedural wallpapers for your iPhone.

  

• Taxi!: With Safari, it can take over a dozen taps to find a nearby taxi company. With Taxi!, you’re only one tap away from hailing your next cab.

  

• Taxi Guide: With the Olympics just around the corner, you’ll need this app to help you browse Beijing hot spots and tell your taxi cab driver where to go … in Chinese, of course!

  

• WAn/WordPress Demo: Make your WordPress site look great on the iPhone.

Fun

• Free Kaleidoscope: An open source kaleidoscope application using OpenGL.
• Paddle Ball: Bounce the virtual ping-pong ball on your virtual paddle and don’t let it fall to the virtual ground!
• PushUp: Get in shape by having your iPhone count how many pushups you can do. Be sure to touch your nose to the screen to make it count!
• Tally Counter: A simple tally counter.

Development

• Gap: Open source development tool and framework for accessing features of the iPhone SDK from within HTML and JavaScript.
• TouchClipboard: Copy and paste clipboard frameworks for iPhone applications.
• GreasePocket: GreaseMonkey functionality on the iPhone.
• MagicTable: Build data-driven iPhone user interfaces with XML documents.
• REDACTEDDebugger: Debugging framework.
• TouchJSON / TouchSQL / TouchXML: Open source libraries and frameworks for handling RESTFUL JSON-based Web services, communicating to SQLite database and efficiently processing XML documents on the iPhone.

Music

• Harp: Multi-touch harp synthesizer with some unique user interface features.
• hum.itfor.us: A submission from a team in Colorado, hum.itfor.us allows songs to be identified by humming. It is similar in function to Midomi.
• iMusicMash: Retrieve lyrics and more information about songs in your iTunes Music Library by mashing them up with Last.fm and YouTube.

  

• MusicID: Identify music and retrieve additional information about songs.

Social and Gaming

• Bar Trivia: It’s trivia night, but this time with your friends over a Bonjour network.
• DudeZap: Send contacts from one iPhone to another.
• Fwerps: Feed and stroke your pet fwerp or it will become angry with you.
• Hot iPotato: Pass the iPotato to play an elimination game like musical chairs.
• iBoard: A Web-based micro-forum on the iPhone.
• irrSokoban: Move boxes around a maze into designated locations.
• LightBikes: Will you get to the MCP before your opponent gets to you?

  

• rspRoyale: A rock, paper, scissors game you can play with multiple iPhones.
• RPS: Another rock, paper, scissors game you can play with multiple iPhones.
• Tattle Talz: Find out if your friends are telling two truths or a lie on your iPhone.

  

• Wildcard: Free-form gaming surface (checkers, cards, chess, etc.) from the developer of Quicksilver.

  

iPhoneDevCamp 2 Photos

Order these photos from SmugMug

Free streaming music turns people on to new music and encourages them to buy, says social-networking site Last.fm. In the music industry, this will not come as a huge revelation.

Last.fm, acquired by CBS last May, announced Wednesday that since the company launched its on-demand streaming service two months ago, CD and download sales through its partnership with Amazon.com have more than doubled.

So what does that mean?

Music discovery continues to be one of digital music’s greatest vulnerabilities. Nobody has come up with a sure or simple way to help people wade through the millions of tracks available on the Web.

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