Week in review: Knocking app shares your iPhone camera, Twitter debuts new mobile page

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Knocking app lets you see through your friend’s iPhone camera — Knocking, a new application for the iPhone, lets you share footage from your iPhone camera with friends who have the app.

3 ways Bing is ahead of Google — The success of Microsoft’s search engine Bing is indicative of big changes in your average Internet user, says VentureBeat writer Paul Boutin. I won’t recap his entire argument, but it starts with the fact that Microsoft’s San Francisco office is next door to the Westfield mall.

Intel cancels Larrabee consumer graphics chip — The world’s biggest chip maker has been working for years on Larrabee, a chip with dozens of cores for processing graphics. But it looks like Intel’s bid to become a major player in consumer graphics chips has ended in disaster — for now.

Shoppers bought a lot of game consoles on Black Friday — Game consoles flew off the shelves during Thanksgiving week thanks to discounts and marketing promotions that finally brought gamers into stores.

Twitter creator Jack Dorsey shows off his new mobile payments startup — Dorsey launched the site this week for his up-and-coming mobile payments startup, Square. The product lets people process credit card payments through their mobile phone.

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Twitter debuts new mobile page for all those users avoiding apps — The company found that plenty of people were still accessing its old Web site when tweeting from their phones, so Twitter revamped the old site http://m.twitter.com for them.

Comcast / NBC mergers’ critics aren’t convincing — Comcast, America’s largest cable TV operator and Internet provider, agreed earlier to take majority ownership of NBC Universal away from super-conglomerate GE. Paul Boutin writes that the pundits and watchdogs criticizing the deal have gone off the deep end.

hi5 recruits a beastly gaming veteran as its president — Social network hi5 hired a pioneer in the video game industry to kick its social gaming strategy into high gear.

Google Gears’ days may be numbered — Google says it’s scaling back support for Gears, the browser extension it launched in 2007 to add capabilities to web applications such as offline access.

Canopy Financial files for bankruptcy, still no answers on how this happened — Respected Silicon Valley capitalists and others provided money and oversight to the healthcare banking service company, even as it tumbled out of control.