A recap of the Mobile Apps Showdown At CES 2010.

iFart’s flatulence app made $27,000 in sales in one day (and it was Christmas day, no less).

That piece of news is meant to underscore something obvious: there’s a market out there for mobile phone apps, from the really useful (e.g., mobile banking and navigation) to the really useless, but brilliant (e.g., the aforementioned fart-themed app).

This week at CES, the first-ever “Mobile Apps Showdown” was brought to life by the same group behind “Last Gadget Standing.” Eighty developers submitted their apps for consideration, and the top 40 were featured on www.mobileappsshowdown.com. Of that 40, ten were chosen to vie for the big prize in a live competition that ran the gamut from all-business overviews to on-stage karaoke (complete with dancers).

A few notable non-flatulence-related Apps from the Showdown:

Gwabbit was the Showdown’s online winner. It intuitively scans incoming BlackBerry e-mails, finds contacts from info like e-mail signatures and instantly transforms them into contact records within your Outlook address book.

Clixtr took home the gold in the live competition (determined by an audience applause-o-meter that measured the enthusiasm of the standing-room-only crowd). Clixtr “leverages location-based technologies” (which is fancy talk for it knows where you’re taking pictures, GPS-style). Using it is simple: you take a photo, upload it to Clixtr, and if the app detects that you’re near a lot of other people who are ALSO uploading media, it will group them into an album. So if you’re at a big event and you get that nagging feeling that other people are taking better pictures than you are, so what. More than that, Clixtr users can create events, upload mobile photos, and, for the first time ever, create real-time event photo streams with the users around them.

Another one we like a lot is a relative oldie-but-goody: Shazam. Shazam scratches the itch on your brain when you can’t figure out what song is playing on the radio. With Shazam, you hold your phone up to the speaker and the music-tagging app records a short snippet, and provides song and artist information in seconds. Then you can look up discography, watch the video on YouTube, or share it with your friends through SMS or Facebook.

Finally, our favorite out of the top ten: DateCheck, whose tagline is “Look up before you hook up.” A close second in the online completion after Gwabbit, this app performs background checks on your mobile phone when you supply an e-mail address, name or phone number of your prospective (and unsuspecting) date. Then, for example, the Sleaze Detector can give you a heads-up if your date has had troubles with the law... or, when you throw in a date of birth, you can get “Living Situation” information and find out if “sub-level studio” means “Mom’s basement.” DateCheck is bad news for anyone who worries that he is, in fact, a loser, but hopes he can skate by with half-truths through the first date or two. Sorry, dude. You were right to be nervous. ‘Cuz now there’s an app for that.