Jed Stremel, Facebook’s Director of Mobile who has been with the company for four years, has resigned, according to a post on his Facebook profile. Stremel was charged with leading the company’s mobile strategy, and was previously involved in Business Development at Facebook.

Below is Stremel’s bio, taken from last year’s MobileBeat conference page.

Jed Stremel oversees Facebook’s mobile strategy transforming how individuals find and express information relevant to their life. Prior to Facebook, Jed played key partnership, business operations, and strategic roles at high-growth businesses. He spearheaded mobile initiatives for Yahoo! building the company’s efforts to empower seamless communications across SMS, WAP, Java, BREW, and other mobile technologies. At Tellme Jed managed distribution, promotion, and licensing relationships with leading online and telecommunications partners.

Wait! Before you head off to that weekend costume party, snap yourself in your Halloween costume and enter our First Annual(TM) Halloween Costume Contest.

We’re offering one Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 2 Limited Edition Console to the winner of our First Annual CrunchGear Halloween Costume Contest.

Here’s how to enter.

YouTube has just posted a series of videos highlighting one the more impressive feats of Mother Nature: the colorful transition from summer to fall. It may sound a bit lame, but if you’ve ever enjoyed the changing colors of autumn leaves or the charming landscape of a local pumpkin patch, the videos are well worth a look (they remind me a bit of the Planet Earth series that came out a few years ago). You can find the four videos featured at the top of YouTube’s homepage, or you can check out the ones we’ve embedded below.

Twitter tweeted out a message today about a special Halloween feature if you Tweet “#trick” or “#treat.” It was difficult to figure out at first, but if you tweet either from your Twitter home page (this is key, you can’t enable the feature when you are on a client), your home page background will go “ghoulish” and the avatars on the Tweets on your page will turn into zombies and ghouls.

The way to trigger it is by tweeting ONLY “#trick” OR “#treat” with nothing else. #Treat is the top trending topic on Twitter so it looks like the masses haven’t figured it out. If you only post #trick or #treat, it doesn’t actually Tweet it out (if you post from Twitter’s site). Happy Halloween!

Nobody wants to be the kid who only gets invited to birthday parties because his mom calls up the other mom and asks. Everyone knows that only succeeds in making you even more unpopular.

Our guess is a fair number of the geeky employees at Facebook were exactly that kid. Which is why I’m sort of surprised that they’d think asking people to help out Facebook friends who don’t have a lot of Wall activity, or even many other friends. These people get mocked. Obviously.

We’ve all seen the messages under Suggestions on the Facebook home page. So and so only has two friends on Facebook, suggest friends for him? Others are urged to write on the Wall of unpopular users.

A reader writes to us today with a screenshot:

British stealth startup Zkatter is launching a real-time microblogging service in the next few months that could be a hit. Similar in theory to Twitter, Zkatter asks users “What do you see now?” vs. Twitter’s “What are you doing?”

The service, which has been in development since 2008, will allow anybody to broadcast and archive ‘live moments’ comprising location, media (image, video and text) to ‘friends only’ or ‘the public’ which can then be discovered instantly via search and friends time-lines. Zkatter’s focus is towards capturing information that you physically see live which offers a interesting addition to the real-time space.

The wait is over. Twitter’s new Lists feature is now available to all users, project lead Nick Kallen has just confirmed through a tweet. The functionality has been in testing for weeks now with a select group of users, and a couple of weeks ago, opened to a wider audience. As recently as yesterday, only 50% of Twitter had access to Lists, but after an unrelated bug forced Twitter to briefly remove the feature, they were able to roll it out to everyone else quickly.

This means that not only can all users now finally make their own lists, but perhaps more importantly, you can now see which lists you have been included on. The latter is quickly becoming a new metric for measuring popularity on the service (which users seem divided about if that’s a good or bad thing). And everyone will now have access to the third party sites already starting to pop up around the Lists API, such as Listorious, a Lists directory.

Ever since our first Realtime Crunchup last July, the momentum behind realtime streams just keeps getting stronger. Which is why TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I are putting together another Realtime Crunchup on November 20 in San Francisco. Tickets are on sale now (the price is $395 until the final week when they will go up to $495—there are only 500 available).

The one-day event will take place in San Francisco’s fabulous new Intercontinental Hotel. The agenda is still coming together (hey, they don’t call it realtime for nothing). But I am pleased to announce some phenomenal speakers who will be joining us. Many of the members of our Realtime Board will appear on stage, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, FriendFeed founder (now Facebook exec) Paul Buchheit, Microsoft’s FUSE Labs chief Lili Cheng, and angel investor Ron Conway. Twitter COO Dick Costolo will also sit down with me for a conversation about the transition from RSS to Realtime, among other subjects.

As the number of apps in the App Store rapidly approaches 100,000, the fact that growth is still accelerating is pretty staggering. It’s not hard to see why when app development houses are pumping out dozens of apps in short order. But at that volume, most of those apps aren’t going to be very good. Big in Japan, a respected mobile app development house, has a plan to up the ante in terms of both quality and output.

The company has set a goal to release 100 apps before the end of 2010 for the iPhone. How are they going to do this? By pulling together a bunch of developers from around the U.S. to make an app development power house. Currently, the team has assembled 25 developers and 25 user interface guys to work towards the goal. The team members mix and match, pairing up to do one app at a time. When they complete that one, it’s on to the next one, with a new set of partners.

Over the last six months we’ve heard quite a bit about Vevo, a premium content site that’s been called a ‘Hulu for music videos’. The site was originally founded by UMG in a partnership with YouTube and has since added Sony Music Group, with negotiations onging with EMI and Warner. But while plenty has been said about its partners, we still haven’t seen much that shows what the site actually looks like.

Today it looks like Vevo decided to peek out from under the covers, though its appearance was short lived. Our tipster noticed a number of artists who had apparently been given Vevo-linked YouTube accounts, with names like EminemVEVO and DonnaSummerVEVO. Videos from these users look nearly identical to the music videos scattered throughout YouTube, but with one key difference: there’s VEVO branding on the bottom right hand side of the player.

The mobile version of Bing launched alongside the regular site this past summer worked well but lacked some of the bells and whistles that rivals like Google offer in their mobile experience. And with the mobile web becoming increasingly important, a focus on this area is crucial for a fledgling search engine. So today Bing has unveiled a new version of its mobile experience.

The main change is that Bing has been completely revamped for touchscreen smartphones and devices. Currently, this means the G1, the Verizon Imagio, the Samsung Omnia, the Zune HD, and yes, the iPhone. In its blog post, Bing even uses a picture to highlight how nice Bing Mobile looks on the Apple device.

European startup Cloudmade, which offers data and tools to developers and OEMs for mapping and navigation applications, isn’t the only company to get hit hard by Google’s new disruptive Navigation product.

But they aren’t reeling out of control either. Cloudmade CEO Juha Christensen sent us an email that he distributed to partners yesterday. It’s clearly an advertisement for Cloudmade (the last paragraph tells new partners how to get in touch). But it is also a blueprint for how companies can carve out a competitive niche from the Navigation product. We’re posting it because it’s a good example of a measured response to a potentially company-killing development.

There are developers, device makers and carriers who strategically don’t want to let Google in, or can’t get the functionality they want from Google’s APIs. That’s where Cloudmade and others can get a foot in the door.

The email is below:

The Le Web conference in Paris always has a surprise or two for attendees. Last year, author Paulo Coelho spoke about how he uses social networking to spread word about his books, and how he encourages people to download pirated copies of his work. This year, Her Majesty Rania Al Abdullah, Queen of Jordan, will be on stage.

We interviewed Queen Rania earlier this year.

Rania is a monarch on a mission. She focuses much of the messaging on her Twitter account towards helping women and promoting peace and education. A message earlier this week lamented the death of women and children in Pakistan. Another, yesterday, pointed to a NY Times article on the need for schools. She has become very adept at using social media, particularly Twitter and YouTube, to further her causes. And her very authentic, very human voice is doing a lot to dispel stereotypes about the Arab and Muslim worlds.

We first reported on Google’s bucket testing of a new homepage that fades to nothing but its logo and the search box after receiving a tip about it at the beginning of this month. Since then, we’ve been getting more and more incoming tips from people who are starting to see this and haven’t seen our or other reports about the gimmick.

I have yet to see the experimental homepage myself, but judging from our inbox and chatter on Twitter the company does seem to be including more people in the bucket test than was the case a couple of weeks ago. Likely, they need to gain more data from actual usage to decide whether or not it can become a permanent feature or not.

To repeat, do not upgrade your Apple TV to 3.0 if you’re running hacked ATV plugins like XBox Media Center or Boxee. I’m sure this will be fixed in a matter of days – if not hours – but as of right now it means a ride on the Failboat to Sad Trombone Town. That’s right: this update destroys the only thing that makes Apple TV usable and good.

Also, as an added bonus, Apple TV firmware 3.0 is insignificant. It adds Internet radio to the package and improves the UI. It also adds Genius playlists. My cup, as they say, runneth over.

You can pop through to see a video of me trying to hack my 3.0 Apple TV or you can just take this as a word of warning. More info on hacking Apple TV after the jump.

For advertisers on the Web, behavioral targeting is held out as the nirvana they’ve been waiting for: the ability to show ads only to those people most likely to be interested in them based on their past behavior. The growth of this type of ad targeting also raises a host of privacy concerns, but setting those aside for a second, do these ads even work? Do they perform better than regular ads? If they did, you’d expect advertisers to pay more for them and for Website publishers to be flocking to them.

At least for Google, the answer seems to be “No.” According to estimates by Jim Brock, founder of PrivacyChoice, chairman of Attributor and a former senior VP at Yahoo, only about 25 percent of AdSense sites are serving targeted ads, which Google calls “interest-based advertising.”

What recession? Startup Bling Nation just raised $20 million in Series B funding from Balderton Capital for a new cell phone payment system. This brings the startup’s total funding to $33 million since its launch in 2007.

Bling Nation’s ambitions are to establish a revolutionary and comprehensive payments system for physical goods. Here’s how it works. The company partners with local banks in super small communities in the U.S. (where the prominent bank isn’t Citibank or Bank of America). Banks will then offer the consumers who use their services a Bling Nation and “Bank” branded chip that can be stuck onto any cell phone device. The chip will allow any user to make a payment directly out of their checking account similar to a debit payment.

It isn’t the first, and I assume it’s not going to be the last either.

Apple and AT&T are facing a new putative class action from an iPhone user who alleges that the companies misrepresented the phone’s MMS (multimedia messaging service) capabilities.

Clyde Bernard Franklin filed the complaint (case 1:2009cv00704) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama on behalf of all Alabama residents last Wednesday.

As expected, regulatory body ICANN has approved plans to let web addresses be written in non-Latin characters in a move that it calls the “biggest technical change” to how the Internet works since its invention four decades ago.

The vote was announced at the last day of the non-profit group’s Seoul conference.

The proposal would mean that domain names could be written in the languages such as Greek, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Cyrillic and be understood natively by the machines that connect computers together over the web.

Japan went crazy over the iPhone when it made its debut in summer last year, but China as another big Asian market for Apple seems to react differently. The iPhone officially launched in China today, offered by China Unicom, one the country’s three big cell phone carriers. But our friends over at major Chinese news portal 163.com are reporting [Google machine translation] that not too many people were actually queuing up to get one, at least in Beijing.