There definitely are a lot of choices-they can be paralyzing. I agree with bcrawford on this one-pick a language to do the web services portion first. Then mo

There definitely are a lot of choices-they can be paralyzing. I agree with bcrawford on this one-pick a language to do the web services portion first. Then move on to the next level of the stack. In your case this would be either the data level (MySql) or mobile app level (iPhone). I don't know if this helps, but if I were starting from scratch today I'd choose either Ruby or Python for the web services level. They're fun, easy to learn languages that are powerful enough to get the job done.