Earlier today I was driving in awful LA traffic, and I thought of a killer application for the iPhone, but first let me give you a bit of background.

At home, I've got an old server, that was given to me by an client, which permanently lies in a closet. It runs Windows XP and has all my files (music, pictures, videos, apps, etc). I have Hamachi running on it, and I share my music using iTunes, so that my girlfriend and I can listen to my music (80+ gb) from anywhere, using Hamachi and iTunes. I also have Orb installed so I can stream all my media to my phone.

- BAM! -

 Thats when I got the idea. Doesn't the iPhone run a stripped down version of OSX? Couldn't there be an application that does some sort of "VPNing" so that I could potentially stream any of my songs (or photos, videos, etc) to my iPhone from my iTunes at home?

I already do this on my smartphone, that runs over Cingular's Edge network (with an unlimited data plan). I've got a Cingular 3125 and I've got Orb on my server at home. Now, streaming media to a phone drains its battery pretty quickly, I can get about 2 hours of streaming before my phone dies, but since the iPhone will have 8 gb (or 4 gb for $100 less) of storage, I could use it to sporadically view pictures or stream a video to conserve battery.

Another issue with this is that not everyone can just leave a PC on 24/7 (for so many reasons), but what if instead of streaming directly from a user-owned PC, a specialized service could stream from their servers. That service could gather a list of mp3's on my computer, and since I own them legally (hopefully), and stream these files, using their servers and bandwidth.

OK…maybe I'm just going way beyond…but hey…services like Lala.com already exist out there that do something similar.  Any comments?