Sprint's launch plans for the HTC EVO 4G LTE were ruined last week when shipments of their shiny new Android handset were held up by United States Customs, but we're hearing that they may been hitting doorsteps and store shelves sooner than expected. According to Sprint, the devices are now currently sitting safely in Sprint's warehouses and are expected to start trickling out into the world "on or around May 24."

Stevie Turns Your Social Feeds Into TV Shows

We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn't work work, but it's not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV. That's where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it's a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV.

Punch! Launches A Platform For Building Interactive iPad Apps, Sans Developers

It's a familiar story in the tech world: A company wants to build a consumer product, finds that the necessary tools aren't available, creates its own tools, then realizes it has created a broader platform. David Bennahum offers some examples: Zip2. Vignette. TypePad. And yes, his startup Punch!, where Bennahum is co-founder and CEO, and which is launching its publishing platform at Disrupt.

CallApp Uses Social Data To Build A Smarter Smartphone Contact Book

One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn't in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won't know until I pick up. CallApp, a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It's creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a "universal social contact book." It's drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users ? users can edit CallApp listings, and if they can want, they can add their contact book into the company's general database.

Major Steal: King.com Poaches Talent Behind EA?s Sims Social To Lead New London Studio

King.com, the European-casual-gaming-company-that-could, is cementing its ascendance on the Facebook platform by poaching one of the key producers responsible for EA's Sims Social and opening a new game development studio in London. The company just hired Catharina Mallet away from EA to lead the new studio, which should have 40 people by year-end (with her departure first being noted by Business Insider last week). King.com, which started in Sweden and hasn't taken outside funding since raising $43 million seven years ago, is one of two European gaming companies that have made a serious run on the Facebook platform in the last year. While Zynga has seen its revenue growth slow and other longtime Facebook developers like Crowdstar and Funzio have mostly moved onto mobile games, both King.com and Germany's Wooga have both climbed up the developer leaderboards. King.com has beat out EA and more recently, Wooga, for the #2 spot among game developers in terms of daily active users on Facebook, according to AppData. The number of game sessions has also blown up by tenfold to 3 billion per month, from 300 million a year ago.

?Hashtag App? Lets You Follow Twitter & Instagram Hashtags In One Interface

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This is kind of handy - and just in time for TechCrunch Disrupt. The team at Lemon Labs just launched a new app called "Hashtag App," which lets you follow Twitter hashtags on your iPhone or iPad. But there are a bunch of apps for that, including Twitter itself, you say? Very true. That's why Hashtag App kicks things up a notch and supports Instagram hashtags as well. Fun!

Saygent Launches In-App Voice Feedback System: Lets Customers Vent To Apps, Not On Twitter

Apple's Siri has been transforming how people interact with their phones. It taught us that it's not just OK to talk to our phones, but that, in many cases, it's actually a more useful way to get things done. Along those same lines, a company called Saygent is launching a mobile feedback solution which developers can insert into their application to collect feedback from the app's users. Available as an SDK for easy integration, the toolkit can be used within any type of application. But Saygent is specifically targeting the emerging mobile wallet space to start. The idea with mSay, as it's being called, is that mobile wallet providers (think, companies like Visa, MasterCard, Google Wallet, Intuit, etc.) could use Saygent's solution to collect instant feedback about the merchant immediately following a mobile payment/mobile wallet transaction.

How Android Developers Can Thrive With Google Play

Apple?s planned phase-out of the UDID has introduced considerable angst in the app marketing community. The UDID provides a standard, widely supported method for attributing performance of advertising campaigns. Unfortunately, there?s no single solution to replace the UDID and it appears the iOS market is fragmenting, with multiple technologies vying for developer attention. This is making it difficult for app developers to allocate their resources. With all this uncertainty, some marketers are looking more closely at Google Play to fuel their continued growth in mobile. Unfortunately, many marketers are sidestepping Android development based on several published reports indicating that Apple?s iOS monetizes significantly better. Savvy marketers know that high-level statistics often mask a much more complex reality. While we?d never suggest that the iOS market be ignored, once you do the math you may find that Android represents a much more compelling (and profitable) opportunity than you thought.

China Finally OKs Google?s Acquisition Of Motorola Mobility

It's been just over nine months since Google announced their intentions to acquire hardware manufacturer Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, and now it seems that the final pieces of the deal have fallen into place. According to a new report from the Associated Press, Chinese officials have finally given the Google-Motorola deal their blessing.

Kickstarter: Meet CordLite, The Light-Up iPhone Cable For Night Owls

My set ritual before going to bed each night is as follows -- turn out the lights, plug in my iPhone, take off my glasses and attempt vainly to nod off. Step two in that process can be a bit of a crapshoot in the dark, but the folks at Scrap Pile Labs have recently kicked off a new Kickstarter campaign for a product called the CordLite that just may come in handy. As the name sort of implies, the CordLite is a dock connector cable for iDevices that, well, lights up thanks to a pair of forward-facing LEDs. It's a very simple concept, but the thoughtful execution is what make this project worth keeping an eye on.

Facebook?s Acquisition of Karma Brings Mobile Commerce, App Monetization Prowess

Facebook has just acquired mobile commerce startup Karma, which makes apps for gifting friends and family. The terms of the deal are undisclosed but 16 employees of the startup will be joining Facebook. The purchase will help Facebook build up monetization prowess on mobile platforms -- an area it's admittedly weak in. The price was not disclosed. With the deal, Facebook gets two extremely experienced leaders in building and monetizing mobile apps. Karma's chief executive Lee Linden and its co-founder Ben Lewis were behind Tapjoy, a company that became a huge force in distributing and making money from mobile games. Both he and Lewis were product managers at Google and Microsoft. Linden and Lewis have known each other since they were kids and have been building companies together for a couple years.

Tracks Releases Most Ambitious Update Yet: Custom Camera, New Filters, And Real-Time Video

How timely. After launching a year ago at Disrupt NYC 2011, Tracks is today releasing one of its biggest updates to date. The service is much like Color, but without the creepy factor as any and all members of a specific photo-sharing group must be invited. I like to think of it as the place where Color and Google+ Circles intersect, but I far prefer Tracks than either of the former. Thus far Tracks has offered iOS, web- and real-world versions of your tracks (the collection of photos shared with a specific social network, which can be both geo-temporal or last forever). Today, however, the service gets much more beefy, with the ability to shoot and send real-time video and the addition of new filters, Instagram-style. There are now ten filter options on the app, and they'll all work on both photos and videos. But that's not all.

Samsung?s Galaxy S III Reportedly Racks Up Over 9 Million Pre-Orders Worldwide

As if anyone needed any more proof that the Samsung's Galaxy S III would sell like (slightly more expensive) hotcakes, a report from the Korea Economic Daily reveals that the long-awaited handset racked up over 9 million pre-orders from mobile carriers across the globe. To put that number in a bit of perspective, the tremendously popular Galaxy S II was officially unveiled at MWC in February 2011, and managed to rack up 3 million global pre-orders by the end of April. Its successor, on the other hand, managed to garner triple the number of pre-orders in the three weeks since it was revealed in London.

Analysts: Nokia On Track To Burn Through Its Whole $6B Cash Pile In Next 2 Years

The Facebook IPO is expected to usher in a day of massive trading volumes on the markets, and some believe that might translate to a lift for some tech stocks. But one that could really use some help has just been served another course of bad press: Nokia is apparently burning through its cash reserves -- fast. The company, for years the biggest mobile phone maker in the world, has fallen on very tough times, as competition from companies like Samsung, Apple and a barrage of inexpensive device makers, have translated into declines in sales, market share and profitability. That's now translating into what has been identified as another issue: the burning of the cash pile. In the last five quarters, Nokia has burned through ?2.1 billion ($2.7 billion) from its cash reserves. Analysts polled by Reuters on average believe that at the rate Nokia is going, it will go through another ?2 billion ($2.5 billion) in the next three quarters, with the total current cash pile of ?4.9 billion ($6 billion) gone within two years.

Facebook?s $38 Share Price Makes Instagram Deal Worth Nearly $1.2 Billion

Facebook's $38 share price would make its deal to buy Instagram worth nearly $1.2 billion, up from the roughly $1 billion price the company announced in April. That's a nice little bump, but the deal hasn't gone through given regulatory reviews. On top of that, we don't know the restrictions on the shares like when they vest or if they're subject to a lock-up period. When Facebook agreed to buy Instagram, it said it would pay with $300 million in cash and 22,999,412 shares of stock. That stock is now worth nearly $874 million, creating a $1.17 billion price tag.

Verizon: If You Want To Keep Your Unlimited Data, Pay Full Price For Your Next Smartphone

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo ruffled a few feathers yesterday when he mentioned at an investor conference that every one of their customers would be on one of the carrier's new data share plans. In an effort to clarify his meaning, Verizon sent a statement to a handful of news outlets today that shines a bit more light on how they plan to make this situation work.

Everyme Adds Android, A Web App, and Instagram Integration

Everyme, the Y Combinator-backed mobile startup that helps users create groups for private sharing, is launching a whole bunch of new stuff today. For starters, it's releasing apps for both Android and the Web. Co-founder Vibhu Norby says both products have the same features as the iPhone app. On the Android side, Norby says "worked really hard" to create an app that was designed for the platform, rather than just porting over the iPhone app.

Weotta Go: An iPhone App That Suggests Activities For Right Now

Here's an iPhone app for those moments when you're wondering, "Okay, I've got some free time right now ? what should I do?" Weotta Go is actually the latest product from Weotta, a startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last year. At the time, the company had built a website that helped people make plans, such as figuring out where to eat dinner tonight. The iPhone app, on the other hand, is more focused on spontaneity ? say you're at work and want to find somewhere nearby to grab a sandwich, or you've just met up with some friends and don't know where to head next.

Enough With Social Stalking: Business-Focused INTRO App Will Let Members Network More Privately

INTRO, the ambient location app whose claim-to-fame is how it?s angling to become the ?LinkedIn? of the social/local people-stalking space, is now increasing its business-oriented focus. With the iOS app?s most recent update, due to roll out any day (minute?) now, INTRO is adding features that will allow members of groups to connect with each other, even going so far as to shut off networking with people outside of their preferred groups. The company, which was already focused on professional (not social) networking, is integrating Meetup, Eventbrite, and LinkedIn groups for improved matching in the new app, as well as support for private groups, like membership clubs and entrepreneur networks, for example.

T-Mobile Launching New Mobile Broadband Plans For Contract Haters On May 20

T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm noted during their last earning call that their prepaid users helped make up for the loss of 510,000 postpaid subscribers, and now it seems that they've got another bone to throw to the their legions of contract-averse customers. Starting on May 20, T-Mobile will be rolling out a slew of new, no-contract data plans to go with their line of mobile broadband modems, hotspots, and tablets.