I'd love to have witnessed the scene at eBay's house back in 2005 when the FedEx guy delivered their exciting new purchase..."Hey, guys! Skype's arrived!""Awesome! Quick - open it...""Wait, what the hell... this isn't what we ordered. It's just a big box full of users with the word 'Skype' written on the side in Sharpie - none of the core p2p technology is in here.""What? Didn't you read the description before you bid on it?""I guess not. I just got carried away with all the excitement.""Shit dude. How much did we pay?""Uh... $2.6 billion""Man, we have to stop buying stuff on the Internet."

  Transactional advertising network provider Adgregate Markets, a finalist at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference is launching ShopCloud, a platform for building portable shopping carts and other e-commerce applications. ShopCloud's platform lets developers build a variety of applications around e-commerce, including distributed shopping carts, lead generation forms, polls and surveys, and social media apps. The platform also promises security and the ability to build and run secure transactional applications even in non-secure content pages.

  A couple of weeks ago, we put DotBlu (formerly known as BluBet) in the deadpool. The San Francisco startup, which ran an online betting play at launch which later morphed to some sort of social gaming service, discontinued its operations on October 16 despite the startup being backed by a host of star investors (Jawed Karim of YouTube fame and Kevin Hartz of Xoom / Eventbrite to name but a few).Turns out the venture still had a considerable amount of money left in the bank, which they will now be using to run the company in its third life under the name TownHog.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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:

  Here are some stories from this week on CrunchGear:Japanese company announces Dragon Ball headphonesToyjector: Cute mini projector to be released in JapanChoken Bako: Cute Japanese piggy bank

  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.

  The TechCrunch Japan TokyoCamp 2009, a demo event for web startups that took place this Friday, was a total blast. No less than 350 people came to the demo pit and meetup, which were co-organized by DESIGN IT!, LLC (a Sociomedia group company that runs TechCrunch Japan) and Nikkei Digital Core (a community under the umbrella of the Nikkei, Japan’s biggest business publication).This time, TokyoCamp gave a total of 29 startups from three Asian countries (Japan, Singapore and Korea) the chance to present their services to Japan's leading journalists, fellow entrepreneurs, top-level VCs and TechCrunch readers. Here are thumbnail sketches (of varying depth) of all companies that were present at the event. (Here is my report on the first TokyoCamp that took place in August this year.)Quick descriptions of all demo companies after the jump.

  Executives from Tudou—one of two companies left fighting it out to be the YouTube of China—were in San Francisco earlier this week to meet with investors and do a little schmoozing.I met up with CEO Gary Wang and COO Sam Lai, who already raised some $85 million from Granite Global Ventures and General Catalyst Partners, and they swore they weren’t here trying to raise more cash. That's a bit of a shock. Last we wrote about Tudou and its arch-competitor YouKu, they were burning through hundreds of millions between them trying to find what YouTube still hasn’t: A way for online advertising to pay for video’s outrageous broadband costs.

  I'd probably feel slightly smug, if I didn't feel so sick.Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.Unfortunately it's hard to feel smug - hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea - when thirteen innocent people are dead.

  Just five days ago Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said mobile subscriptions, among other scammy offers, would be removed from Zynga's popular Facebook and MySpace games. "We have also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value," he said.So we were surprised yesterday to see a screen shot clearly showing a mobile subscription ad in a post on InsideSocialGames about the launch of a new Zynga game, FishVille.I went to the game to check myself, but those mobile ads weren't there. I assumed they had quickly been taken down, or there was some other reasonable explanation.They weren't taken down though. Or rather, they were, but just for me. Other users were still seeing the same mobile ads. And the filtering was clearly directed at me, since I logged in on the same IPaddress with a friends account and saw the ads. I held a laptop showing the ads up next to my screen that didn't show the ads and took a picture:

  Yesterday I detailed my quest to find the throngs of Droid fans who had woken up at the crack of dawn to grab a place in line before Verizon unleashed the phone to the masses. Yet despite reports of lines elsewhere, I failed — the Verizon store in Palo Alto was a ghost town, as was the Best Buy down the street. Some commenters took my story and similar reports as an indication that the Droid's launch had bombed, doomed to play out the same fate of the numerous supposed 'iPhone killers' before it. It looks like they may be wrong — that store sold over 70 Droids yesterday, according to one of its employees.Today I returned to the Verizon store where yesterday's quest began, looking to get my hands on one of the nifty docking stations that turns your Droid into a desktop clock/multimedia station. And while I expected a handful of other customers to be in the store, I was taken aback by just how crowded it was — each of the registers was busy ringing up a customer while others waited their turn, four people were standing in line just to touch the demo Droid unit, and I had to put my name on the list to talk to someone.