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As we first reported last night, Apple is finally allowing live streaming video applications into the App Store. Apple’s acceptance of the Ustream Live Broadcaster has seemingly paved the way for other live-streaming apps. And one of the best known ones, Qik, is wasting little time to get its app out there. The company writes in a blog post today that they’ve already submitted their app for approval.

I’ve actually had the Qik live-streaming app on my iPhone for a while, thanks to the magic of ad-hoc distribution. Unfortunately, Apple’s policies restrict the number of copies Qik can send this way, so the application remained mostly a proof-of-concept for most people. Given how quickly Qik submitted the app to the store, we expect the official build that will likely get approved to be the same one we have been using, which we reviewed here. It’s solid, but the video quality leaves a little to be desired compared to some competing video apps (none of which did live streaming).

Like Ustream, Qik did release a version of its app that allowed users to upload videos — but not live videos, until now.

Following Ustream and Qik, you can probably expect other companies like 12seconds to get into the iPhone live streaming game as well. Once all these apps are available, the question is how much will people use them? Services like Qik in particular seemed hot among some of the tech elite last year, but this year have seemed to have large cooled off. Perhaps that’s because people have been ditching their Nokia phones (it seemed like everyone was using the N95 with Qik for a while) in favor of devices like the iPhone. Now that these apps are allowed on the iPhone, will we see a resurgence of links to live streams on Twitter again?

Below find some examples of Qik videos I shot with my iPhone 3GS using the ad-hoc version of the app.

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Dropbox, the impressive file syncing service which makes it easy to sync your files across multiple computers and the web, has released a brand new version of its online interface. Today’s upgrade brings with it a number of new features that will make it much easier to manage the large number of files users often have on their Dropboxes.

Among the new features are the ability to select multiple files in the file browser and perform bulk operations on them. You can also select multiple files and have them placed into a new Zip file, which will make it easy to send multiple files at once. Other new improvements include a search feature, Gmail-style keyboard shortcuts, and a version of the site that’s been optimized for mobile phones. Of course, many people primarily use Dropbox through its desktop clients that integrate quite nicely with your operating system, but these are welcome additions for anyone who has to access their files when they’re away from their primary computer.

For those iPhone users looking to get their fix, Dropbox submitted an iPhone application to the App Store about four weeks ago which still has not been approved by Apple. This is just one of the many iPhone developers that has been waiting for more then the usual two week waiting period to get their app approved.

Dropbox launched almost exactly one year ago at TechCrunch50, and has grown quite a bit over the last year with over 1,000,000 users. Dropbox is based in San Francisco and has raised $1.5 million from Sequoia Capital.

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There are currently many image sharing applications available on the web, such as Skitch, LittleSnapper and Flickr. Each of these applications attempts to make image sharing easier. TinyGrab is launching a new application that makes image sharing a two-click process.

TinyGrab is a simple utility for Mac OS X users using the power of Mac OS X’s built in screenshot capabilites, TinyGrab instantly uploads and allows you to share your screen images with a small URL. TinyGrab is Mac only, but according to Keyone Productions, the company behind TinyGrab, there are Windows and Linux versions coming.

Here’s how it works. You take a screen shot, like you usually would with Command + Shift + 4. Your screenshot will be uploaded to TinyGrab in the background in under 30 seconds. When TinyGrab turns green, the upload is complete and a link to the image copied to your clipboard. TinyGrab then generates a short URL for you to share across the web. If you have a premium account, you can upload your images through an FTP server, and search through your “grabs.”

You can create a free user account, which gives you 3 free screenshots a day, plus the ability to share with a TinyGrab UR. Login to your account at TinyGrab.com and see past uploads, delete them or upgrade your account to a premium account for a one time payment of £10 payment, or $16 U.S. You’ll find a demo video below.

Update: We have spoken to Chris Leydon from Keyone Productions, the company behind TinyGrab, and he mentioned that they offer 10 grabs for free now, and not 3.

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Have you ever wanted to rearrange your applications on your iPhone, but ended up messing up pages of apps? Well, now there is a solution for that, and it’s called Movement. Movement essentially lets your rearrange all of your applications on your iPhone or iPod Touch, straight from your Mac. Seems too good to be true, right? Of course, there’s a catch. It requires a jailbroken iPhone.

MG Siegler wrote about iTunes 9 a few weeks ago on TechCrunch, with the possibility of app organization, but it’s all up in the air right now.

Overall, Movement is very cool. It provides a tool that many iPhone and iPod Touch users want, but under a cost of jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod Touch. Movement is developed by indie Mac developer Jeff Stieler.

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Most of us are pretty annoyed with auto direct messages over Twitter. Well, Brent Spore took his thoughts in the public eye. He recently launched StopAutoDM, a movement to end the automatic direct messages. The idea and site are simple; you tweet out with the hash tag #stopautodm and it will show up on the site.

When we spoke to Spore, he mention that he just got “fed up” with all the auto DM’s he was getting, and there needed a way to stop it. Just another side project that means well. Just recently, Twitter changed the format of their direct messages with a new design.

For example, when Spymaster, the Twitter-based game, first came out, they used automatic direct messages which caused user revolt. Since then, the direct messages have been removed. There is still no clue on what Twitter will do to stop the automatic direct messages, but all we can do is hope that everyone ends the madness.

Update: Spore left a comment below explaining more about StopAutoDM.

Just an FYI: The site was launched exactly one month ago (stopautodm.com) it was never intended to start a movement or claim some crunch press or promote anything. I just got frustrated with the amount on impersonal DM’s I would get from people after following them. I think the purpose and goal of the site is pretty clear in the description on the side. It’s nothing more than a public service announcement to help people understand that twitter is not a place to blast spam but make real connections with people you are interested in. The third party software(s) that make these type of actions possible have a lot of great features, but the point is that this one service is polluting the nature of twitter. So I decided to make a simple site that informed and educated. That’s it.

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