There's a board game similar to Risk called Diplomacy that might make even more sense on the iPhone. It's played with seven people, and maybe all of them would need iPhones, but there are a few cool things it could do.

Movement orders for the pieces are all submitted at once for all players and are executed simultaneously (an example of one might be "Fleet in Stevastopol move to the Black Sea", or "F Sev - Bla" for short), and this would be super easy to do on on an iPhone, and it could resolve the orders and figure out what happens, and update everyone's version of the gamestate.

Also, a large part of the game is going off into a corner or side-room with one or two people and tryijng to make agreements - it might be useful to have a copy of the map on your phone that you could move pieces around on and plan in advance..
(this works but much less well on a piece of paper, and you can't use the real board because then everyone else knows what you are planning)

You might even be able to play games remotely... people play online all the time, with a turn every few days and games taking weeks or months, and the iPhone app could let you call your opponents on the phone? (and maybe conceal phone numbers if they were strangers)

Precedent - http://sillysoft.net/lux/

This idea is for people who are busy, important, or otherwise have lots of demands on their time.

This person makes their to-do list publicly available online. Others can request this person's time/attention by adding new items on the list. The trick to make this ever-growing to-do list manageable is that others can not only add to the list but also complete tasks on the list. People who complete tasks on the list earn "karma" that they can spend to prioritize other tasks (either tasks they themselves submitted or any tasks they would like to see completed).

People who use such lists can effectively crowdsource the completion and prioritization of their to-do lists. It also has the effect that tasks that can be easily completed by others will be, and the owner of the list is left with more time to focus on tasks that require their particular attention.

application that runs in the background separate from a web browser (similarly to quicksilver) and listens constantly for changes to the browsing history of *any* of the web browsers on the computer (firefox, safari, chrome, etc). this would enable you to use different browsers for different tasks (chrome for google docs, safari for flash, firefox for reading, etc) while still compiling a unified history.

you could the invoke the hotkeys, type some words from the page url or title, and then either open it in a new tab in the default browser, or choose a browser like you would with quicksilver.

since browsers can import the history from other browsers, it seems like this would be possible. could have other cool features like showing statistics about browsing behavior and integration of bookmark data without bloating the browser itself

AND you could make it a social app and possibly share your history with other people, or send things to others directly from the quicklaunch box

maybe this is just a quicksilver plugin?

A "digital good" is anything that has negligible replication costs but high up-front costs.

A creator of digital goods (musician, author, filmmaker, whatever) offers to make their next work "free" for everyone (either gratis or libre, but at the very least free to copy and share), IF a "ransom" auction is met. The creator sets a price $x (higher than the up-front cost of creation), and once the sum of public donations towards the ransom price has met at least $x, the creator "releases" the work to the public.

In this setup "piracy" is a feature, not a bug. The creator encourages people to copy and share the work in the hopes that it will increase the price they can ask in "ransom" for the next thing they create.