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• Forget iPhone MMS, Share 100 Pictures In An Instant With Knocking

  As we were all painfully aware, it took AT&T forever to bring MMS to the iPhone. A new app has just been released that hopes to one-up it. Knocking, made by Pointy Heads Software, is basically a photo-sharing app on steroids. With it, you can pretty much instantaneously share up to 100 photos at once between two iPhones. This works by establishing a connection between the two phones, during which one user selects another user with the app and "knocks" the pictures over to them. The video below shows just how simple and fast this process is. - 4 hours ago

• Popular iPhone App TweetDeck Gone Missing From The App Store

  A couple of days ago, I checked if there were any updates for the applications I have installed on my iPhone, and one that was identified as having published a more recent version in the App Store was TweetDeck, the popular Twitter client for desktop and mobile. Strangely, the update failed and I just gave up trying to install the upgraded version after a while. Now it seems the TweetDeck iPhone app is MIA from Apple's App Store completely, barring new users from installing the app on their phones and existing ones to upgrade to a new version. - 4 hours ago

• Splurb Surfaces The Most Popular Links Across Social Media Sites

  There are many sites that show trending links across the web including TweetMeme, Topsy, and Bit.ly. Recently launched splurb is now in the mix with its site that shows the most popular links that are trending on social media sites. splurb currently indexes Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, TweetMeme, Yahoo Buzz and Fark. Splurb tallies the number of votes from the various sites and number of sources that list links. The more sources that cite a link, the larger the story appears on splurb. To get listed, a link must be popular on at least two social websites. - 16 hours ago

• Zynga To Remove All In Game Offers

  Last week Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said that they would take steps to remove scammy advertising offers from their social games. There have been a couple of missteps since then, and Facebook responded by taking Zynga's newest game, FishVille, offline. Zynga insists they are serious about cleaning up the industry. And today Pincus has announced that the company will remove all offer advertising from their games. This isn't a meaningless action. Offers account for 1/3 or so of Zynga's rumored $250 million in revenue. All offers will be removed by the end of today, says Pincus, "until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves." The blog post also discloses that Zynga is an investor in DoubleDing, an offer provider that competes with OfferPal and SuperRewards. DoubleDing was serving the mobile offers that popped back onto Zynga on Friday. Pincus' blog post: - 18 hours ago

• CrunchGear Week in Review: Imported Treats Edition

  Here are some stories from this week on CrunchGear: Japanese company announces Dragon Ball headphones Toyjector: Cute mini projector to be released in Japan Choken Bako: Cute Japanese piggy bank - 18 hours ago

• Zynga’s FishVille Sleeps With The Fishes For Ad Violations

  Zynga's most recent Facebook game, FishVille, has temporarily been taken offline by Facebook for advertising violations. FishVille will remain suspended, Facebook tells us, "until Facebook is satisfied that Zynga demonstrates compliance with Facebook restrictions -- as well as Zynga's own restrictions -- on the ads it offers users." This is a relatively light slap on the wrist since the game only launched two days ago and had a couple of thousand users (Update: Zynga says FishVille had 875,000 users yesterday. wow). Zynga's other games, including FarmVille with 63 million monthly users, remain online, despite the fact that they were showing the same ads. But this does send a clear message to Zynga and other game developers that Facebook isn't ignoring the problem. Whether it's a real concern over the user experience or simply embarrassment from the press suggesting Facebook is a haven for scammers is somewhat irrelevant. Facebook has also shut down a total of four ad networks in recent months for ad violations, including Tatto Media and Gambit. Other networks, such as SendMe Mobile, which was founded by ex-CNET executives, have largely taken their place by offering similarly questionable offers that trick users into mobile subscriptions. This is also a bit of an arms race. Zynga may be specifically filtering Facebook employees from seeing ads that violate Facebook terms and conditions, making it difficult for Facebook to enforce the rules. And the relationship between the two companies is complicated. Facebook battling Zynga on the advertising scams. But Zynga is also one of Facebook's largest advertisers, probably accounting for between 10% and 20% of total Facebook revenue. - 19 hours ago

MobileCrunch Headlines

• The iPhone is coming to The Shack

  There were rumors out there that the iPhone would be coming to authorized resellers soon, and we’re finally starting to see it showing up. Surprisingly, The Shack will be the first one out the gate. The story dropped this morning, via an announcement from the executive vice president of store operations. The letter said that the [...] - 2 days ago

• Chinese Michael Jackson phone is no Thriller

  ♪It’s close to midnight and something cheesy’s lurking in the dark Under the moonlight, you see a phone that almost makes you barf♪ Man. Just last weekend, I was looking at my boring ol’ phone and thinking to myself: if only this were covered in faux-gold and diamonds and molded to look vaguely like Michael Jackson’s torso! Some [...] - 3 days ago

• Android Developer Challenge 2 Finalists Posted, Final Judging Begins

  Early this morning, 200 Android developers woke up to one hell of an e-mail: they'd made it into the final round of the second Android Developer Challenge, and were thus one giant step closer to as much as $250,000. Android Developer Challenge 2 officially began way back in May, though the actual voting didn't begin until some time in September. The votes were split amongst Android users and Googlers (with the latter getting a 55% say), with all voting taking place in a special, custom-made application. To be eligible, applications had to be completely fresh (read: no updates allowed) to the Android Market as of August 1st, couldn't have been a part of the first Challenge, and must run on Android v1.5. - 3 days ago

• Smartphone Showdown: iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid Round 2

  My inbox is in pain. Almost immediately after I hit the publish button on last week’s iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid Smartphone Showdown, a torrential blast of comments and questions has been barraging just about every communication inlet I’ve got. Phone calls. Twitter DMs. Lots, and lots, and lots of emails. Across the board, it [...] - 3 days ago

• There is another: The third Droid phone hits FCC

  Not sure what to make of this Droid-alike but it seems Verizon has another Droid on its way, this time called the Saygus VPhone V1. It looks very much like the standard droid but a bit smaller and with a 624MHz Marvell processor. It’s abundantly clear that Verizon is going to run this Droid branding into [...] - 4 days ago

• Samsung to launch the Mythic and Flight for AT&T on Nov. 8th

  Another week, another truckload of Samsung devices dumped onto the shelves. This week's Samsung shipment brings two new TouchWiz-based touchscreen handsets: the Mythic, and the Flight. Before we dive into the specs, we gotta give Samsung some grief for the names. Not because they're bad - in fact, I really, really like both of these names. So much that I wonder why the hell Samsung is giving them to two random TouchWiz handsets. I mean, come on: LG has to resort to calling one of their best selling phones "Cookie", and you throw away Mythic? For shame! Anyway, on to the handsets: - 4 days ago