Earlier this week, I was in Kunshan, China, to attend the 3G Industry Summit [CN], a four-day event that has attracted a few dozen speakers and an audience of over 200 people, making it one of the biggest of its kind in this country. The annual event is organized by the Kunshan government and Mobile 2.0 Forum, a communication platform with more than 1,500 members, almost single-handedly run by industry veteran Leo Wang.The summit reassured me of one thing: The Chinese market for mobile hardware, software and contents is big already and it's bound to become huge in the very near future.Information and stats on China's mobile web sector and profiles of 16 Chinese mobile startups after the jump.

  Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit, Founder's Fund managing partner Sean Parker gave a provocative presentation entitled "The New Era Of The Network Service." In it, he argues that so-called "network services" like Facebook (which he helped start) and Twitter will soon dominate the web, rather than "information services" like Google and Yahoo.It's a very interesting idea, to say the least, and obviously you're interested in it, as about 200 of you commented on it yesterday. So we've obtained Parker's full slide deck from his presentation. Find the full presentation embedded below, definitely worth the read.

  Last week Apple surprised the iPhone's developer community with the annoucement that it was finally allowing free apps to offer in-app purchases. The move will likely lead to a fundamental shift in the way developers conduct businesss on the App Store (we've already begun to see some changes). I sat down with SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar to talk about the annoucement's effect on SGN's upcoming games, as well as its impact on the market in general.Pishevar says that he was estactic when he heard the news — he almost immediately recorded a video sharing his elation that he sent to all of SGN's 100+ employees worldwide. He explains that this is really the announcement that he's been waiting for, but that he had no expectation that Apple might do it so soon. Now the company is working at a brisk pace to take advantage of the change: it will soon be releasing a new free version of its smash hit game F.A.S.T., which has done over $1.8 million in sales before Apple's cut.

  Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is resigning from Yahoo's board of directors. According to MarketWatch, he said "there was not a need at this time for an activist investor" at Yahoo anymore and that he'd rather focus on other companies. The subtext there being that either A) he feels that his work is done and he can move on now that the search deal with Microsoft is moving towards government approval, or B) he can make more money by trying to control some other company.

  It's inevitable: With Facebook change, comes Facebook backlash.Today's introduction of the new-style News Feed on Facebook has been garnering quite a bit of positive buzz. But this is Facebook we're talking about. Anytime they change anything, the backlash starts quickly. Sometime's it's justified, but quite often it's users overreacting from the natural human feeling to dislike change.Not surprisingly, there are already plenty of Facebook groups against new changes. But hands down the best is "I AUTOMATICALLY HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK HOME PAGE," which of course, pokes fun at what I'm talking about. But the best part? Facebook employees like Ivan Kirigin and Ari Steinberg have already joined it. More notable, so has Mark Zuckerberg.

  Remember, earlier this month when we wrote about the upskirt app that Apple deemed kosher, while at the same time banning a satirical Someecards app from the App Store? Yeah, we may have found an even better example of Apple's hilarious hypocrisy.Truth is, it wasn't hard to find. The app called "Asian Boobs" is a top seller right now in the App Store. So what is it? Well, the title says it all: It's an app that features the breasts of Asian women. Lots of them. Over 2,500 of them. And actually you can double that, for each breast in each picture. That's a lot of boobs.

  Much like everyone thinks they're the best driver in the world, everyone thinks they're great in the sack. Maybe you've got the Kama Sutra down like the back of your partner's... hand; maybe you've used that internet connection to amass a few external drives full of "training material". Whatever arts you're trained in, the question has almost undoubtedly popped into your head during the heat of the moment: "Am I good at this the best lover in the world?" Well, friends, to fall back on an almost-stale cliche that I promise we'll use only a few dozen more times: there's an app for that.

  Since its inception, Google Maps has always rolling out little tweaks and new features that are useful. But today comes the first large-scale overhaul of the look and feel of the service in quite a while. But you may not even notice it.The reason is that almost all of the changes are very subtle. And unless you spend hours looking at Google Maps everyday, you probably aren't going to realize when a road outline has been toned down, for example. But looking at the side-by-side images, it's clear to see that the new look is much nice. Gone is much of the clutter cause by darkened street outlines.

  If you’re on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We’ve added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks, including two jobs here at TechCrunch. Here’s a quick sample:Director of Local Business MarketingYelp - San Francisco, CALead Ad Optimization EngineerScribd - San Francisco, CAAccount Supervisor - Deputy Director of TechnologyEdelman - Washington D.CLead & Senior LAMP Web Developers / Software Engineersisocket - San Mateo, CAWeb DeveloperTesla Motors - San Carlos, CA

  A judge in the Northern California District Court has thrown out the countersuit Power.com levied against Facebook over the summer. Power.com filed its countersuit in July, alledging that, among other things, Facebook is unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook’s own ToS) and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services.Power.com is a service that allows users to aggregate all of their social network activity into a central hub, and has done so through methods that Facebook says violate its terms of use. Facebook filed suit against the company at the beginning of this year for scraping data and storing user credentials. A week later there were reports that the two parties were near a settlement, but that clearly didn't happen.

  So, I don't know if you've heard, but these iPhone app things are a pretty big deal. With the iPhone continuing to sell in record numbers, more and more new users are exploring the App Store everyday to find the apps they want. One of the most popular type of apps are Twitter apps. And the obvious way to find those is to type "Twitter" into the iTunes search box. This query brings up a couple apps called "Twitter." The only problem? They are in no way official Twitter apps, as the name might imply. And one of them isn't even actually called that.Over the past couple of weeks, we must have been pinged a couple dozen times from people pointing this out. Some of those people were unfortunately tricked into buying these apps, which are not free. Looking at the top paid apps list in the social networking area of the App Store, sure enough, both the app called "Twitter" and the one called "Twitter Pro" are top sellers, at #5 and #9 respectively.

  The first Android-powered phone launched in Japan last June. Users were able to access free apps on the Android Market, with paid apps to become available at a later point. Paid apps for U.S. users came to the market in February. Now it appears that paid apps have finally come to Japan.As we wrote in May, the country’s largest telecommunications company, NTT, has picked up the rights to distribute the first mobile phone that uses the Android OS in Japan. The first paid apps hit the Android Market today for Japanese users. The apps are listed on the Japanese version of AndroLib, which lists applications and games for Android for various countries.

  Facebook has just announced that it is beginning to roll out a modified version of its homepage that incorporates the 'Highlights' section into the News Feed. You'll now be able to jump between two different versions of the feed: the Live Feed, which displays your friends' updates in real-time, and the News Feed, which displays the top items your friends have posted over the last few days (these generally are the most commented on/Liked stories).The new design is a compromise between the 'old' News Feed, which used algorithms to present stories Facebook thought you'd find interesting, and the feed Facebook rolled out back in March that consisted of a Twitter-like stream of recent updates. Since this year's redesign Facebook has used the 'Highlights' section at the right hand side of the screen to present items you may have missed, but this was never an ideal solution: for one, you couldn't see your friends' comments on these posts, and the small space afforded to Highlights made it easy to pass over.

  The last thing the world needs is another video site, right? Well, that's not stopping Aaron Crayford, who convinced a bunch of his supercomputer engineer buddies to put together Rippol, a video discovery site that blends hardcore machine learning with social streams. Rippol (not to be confused with rrripple, the media sharing site) is coming out of stealth today into private beta. Be one of the first 1,000 people to try it by signing up here. (If you don't get an invite, the site will be launching publicly in a month at our next Realtime Crunchup).Rippol is still in raw form (the UI needs more polish, not all the buttons work the way they should), but it is experimenting with some powerful ideas in online video. You can sign in with Facebook Connect, or create your own account (it will also support Twitter and Gmail sign-ins soon). Once you have friends on the system, it lets you discover new videos through your friends. The homepage is an activity stream of the videos you and your friends have watched, favorited, rated, and reviewed. And a global stream in the left column shows what the broader Rippol community is watching. Links to any video can also be shared on Facebook or Tweeted out.