What’s next for the iPhone? Well, to borrow a phrase from the Fantastic Four’s Human Torch, “Flame On!”

That’s generally the idea behind Sonic Lighter, an “interactive sonic application” for the iPhone from the creative folks at Smule.

Sonic Lighter won’t make you work faster or more effectively, won’t get you a better job by reconnecting you with long lost acquaintances and it won’t help you get organized. Nah, it’s one of those silly little fun applications that’s well worth the $0.99 for the ‘wow your friends’ factor alone. You can see an eerily effective video of Sonic Lighter in action, here.

There are other ways to show flame on the iPhone, like Freebird, which lets you choose from different flame settings, like a candle or glowstick. Great for holding up at concerts. But Sonic Lighter is cooler. You can actually blow on the flame through the iPhone’s microphone and have it move around or even blow it out, just as you might with a lit match. You can also manipulate the flame with your finger — and not get burned.

Or, want to give another iPhone user a light? No problem, just touch another iPhone and your Sonic Lighter flame spreads to the other device. .

You can also check out the company’s “Global flame map” for a worldwide view of other recently “lit” iPhones.

And stay tuned for more. “We’ll continue to leverage our love for sound and our drive to be creative,” said Dr. Ge Wang, founder and CTO of Smule told me.

Magical applications

Wang said he likes the idea of working with everyday technology to bring a more human element to the devices we use all the time. “The phone has become a natural extension of our lives and we’re looking at how to combine that with our love of sound and music and create magical applications.”

Capturing microphone input was one creative twist. “That technology was just waiting there to be used,” said Wang. “It came out of a team brainstorming session trying to figure out how to best leverage some of the research that’s been done in computer music and by the audio community.’

Wang, a professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford, started Smule with some other Stanford and Princeton music PhD’s. He’s also the director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra which you can hear a little bit of here.

Well, that’s what I thought was going to happen Thursday. Yahoo invited an A list of media to a press briefing on its strategy. I was told by Yahoo’s PR firm that embattled CEO Jerry Yang would be there along with other Yahoo execs. But Jerry was a no show.

Gillian Nash, a Yahoo senior VP and corporate communications officer, told me the plan was for Jerry to duck out of a Cisco board meeting (he’s on the board) to briefly mingle with the assembled press, but the board meeting ran long and that plan was scrapped.

Yahoo president Sue Decker was grilled by an investor at the recent Yahoo shareholders meeting who demanded she justify being a board member of Berkshire Hathaway, Intel and Costco. Other Yahoo execs came to Decker’s defense, noting the time spent on those board meetings, learning how other big companies are dealing with growth issues and other challenges, is useful to Yahoo.

Now Yang’s soaking in what Cisco has to offer. Question, does Yahoo have time for all this learning?

Meanwhile, back at Yahoo’s HQ yesterday, Hilary Schneider said she wanted to address the “confusion out there” about Yahoo’s advertising deal with Google, which has come under regulatory scrutiny. The alliance will let Google serve a portion of the ads that appear on Yahoo’s search results pages. Critics charge that an alliance of the two largest players would turn the search-advertising market into a monopoly, driving up prices and diminishing competition.

In a brief demo, Schneider, a Yahoo advertising executive vice president, showed two screens of search results for “Red Roses in Birmingham, Alabama.” The Yahoo page had no right column advertisers, while the Google page had a list of 11 advertisers on the right column.

“By providing more advertisers, we think it’s a better consumer experience that we know is relevant because of the search terms,” she said. “By enabling Google to have access to the query term, it’s a better return on investment for the advertiser and, we think, a better consumer experience.”

But the demo left search expert Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land scratching his head. “Almost all those advertisers are on Yahoo already,” he told me. “If they’re not showing up in the query results, Yahoo must have not have the same broad matching as Google.”

Of course there’s no confusion about the very real bottom line benefit Yahoo expects to get from deal, some $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow in the first year, which analyst’s have called “free money” for the Web giant.

UPDATE: The folks at One Laptop Per Child got back to me with a statement following my recent blog post on its plans to sell through online commerce giant, Amazon.

It was tough to get many details on this story because the only information came from a news items briefly quoting an OLPC team member who blabbed prematurely about the Amazon deal. An OLPC spokesperson told me the group didn’t issue a press release because Amazon doesn’t announce things until they’re available at their online storefront.

My original post described how Amazon plans to offer XO Laptops as part of OLPCs “Give One, Get One” program where you essentially pay for two of the devices, keep one and let OLPC ship the other one to a child in a developing country.

Today’s statement from Amazon adds a few more details, starting with, why the switch to Amazon:

“Although the first iteration of the ‘G1,G1’ program was extremely successful and sold more then 185,000 laptops, the delivery of the laptops in the USA did not run as smoothly as we anticipated. Selling the laptops on Amazon.com will provide us with the resources to process and ship the laptops globally in a timely fashion.”

Secondly, Amazon spelled out that although OLPC has talked about working with Microsoft, Windows is not part of this offering.

“Contrary to some media reports, it will be a Linux-based XO Laptop that will be offered as part of the global initiative and not a dual-boot machine running both Windows and Linux,” OLPC said in a statement.

The One Laptop Per Child project is looking to mega-online retail giant Amazon to try and pump more sales for its kid-friendly, XO notebook computer. Specifically, Amazon will be the main reseller for OLPC’s “Give One, Get One” program it developed last year, according to a report . Neither Amazon nor OLPC has anything about Amazon’s participation at their sites, and I couldn’t reach anyone at either company for comment.

(UPDATE: The One Laptop Per Child folks got back to me, and along with a statement posted by Amazon, offered some new information and corrected a few misconceptions here.)

The Give One, Get One program is designed to provide a way for generous consumers to help get the notebooks into the hands of kids in poor countries. Essentially, you buy two of the notebooks; one goes to you, the other is donated to a child in a developing country. The report said Amazon will start selling the colorful XO notebooks later this November.

Back in 2006, the founders of the project said the goal was to develop a notebook with easy to use, educational software installed that could sell for $100 in mass quantities to developing nations.

When the XO came out last year though, OLPC wasn’t able to get the price quite that low. The OLPC Web site says a donation of $200 will deliver a new XO laptop to a child in a developing nation.

It’s not known what the price on Amazon will be. OLPC has been a somewhat controversial project. The organization charged Intel with trying to undercut its plans overseas, then made peace, agreeing to let the chip giant join the non-profit organization as a board member. But then later the two had a falling out and Intel went back to focusing on its own “Classmate PC” line of low cost computers. The XO runs on AMD processors.