Japanese messaging app, Line, has just reported that new users in Hong Kong have been doubling each day for the past week since Jan 29.

The app, which is the dominant messenger of choice in Japan, launched its Chinese version on Dec 12, and looks like it’s riding a huge wave of momentum in Asia, ranking first on the free app category in countries there like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand, to name some.

Line provides free calls and chatting, and the company noted in its latest announcement that the hike in numbers in Hong Kong seems to have been prompted by some service provider decisions to impose annual fees on SMS messages.

Ready for a break from all that football to talk some tech? Well you’re in luck, because it’s time for CrunchWeek, the TechCrunch TV show where a few of us writers take a look back at the past seven days and talk about a few of the week’s most interesting stories. It was as interesting a week as ever for the tech world, so we pushed back posting a bit today to make sure we didn’t get too lost in the Super Bowl buzz.

This week, Leena Rao and I were very happy to be joined by our New York-based colleague Jordan Crook to discuss Facebook’s mobile victories in its latest quarterly earnings report, RIM and BlackBerry’s latest big move toward a real comeback (complete with a random celebrity endorsement), and all the fun we had at the 6th annual Crunchies. Check it all out in the video embedded above.

Look! Apple just released a new product during the Super Bowl. Actually, it’s a new product for App Store developers – short “AppStore.com” vanity URLs. The domain made a grand public appearance at the end of the ad for the new Star Trek movie, which pointed viewers to Appstore.com/StarTrekApp instead of, perhaps, Facebook.com/StarTrekMovie or the movie’s homepage, which is the kind of link that usually gets this prime spot in TV advertising.

CNET was the first to spot the ad, noting that the domain “AppStore.com” was a personal gift to Steve Jobs from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff back in 2008.

Developers will now receive their shortened URL names when they submit their apps to either the iTunes App Store or the Mac App Store, according to Apple Developer documentation on the matter, which was updated on January 31 with info about the new URLs:

When I was but a wee lad, I hosed my share of family computers simply because I wanted to help out — once I tried to free up space on a 6GB hard drive by deleting anything larger than 1MB. You can imagine how well that played out.

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the founders of Barcelona-based Now Computing went through something similar, because they’ve just recently launched a Kickstarter project for a device that should ensure it never happens again.

At its core, the $59 StormFly is little more than a 16GB USB 3.0 flash drive with a bootable version of Ubuntu that someone (ideally a kid) can wear on their wrist. After a little bit of setup (mostly changing the boot sequence in a PC’s BIOS), those little ones whip the USB bracelet off their wrists, plug it into a PC or a Mac, and do whatever it is that kids do on computers these days without having to worry. Thankfully, since the StormFly’s user never has access to the OS that’s actually installed on the host computer, there’s no way for them to royally screw things up by mucking with other people’s settings or downloading things they really shouldn’t be.

When Google launched its Linux-based Chrome OS in early 2010 and its Chromebook pilot program later that year, most pundits didn’t quite agree with our own MG Siegler’s premise that Google had dropped a “nuclear bomb on Microsoft.” A few years later, it sure doesn’t look like Microsoft has much to fear from Chrome OS. But despite its slow start, it looks as if the Chrome OS momentum is slowly picking up.

Google has traditionally been very quiet about Chromebook sales and mostly focused on very large enterprise and educational installs. That’s clearly also the target market for the Chrome OS ecosystem right now, but when Acer says that its $199 C7 Chromebook now accounts for 5-10 percent of its U.S. shipments, it’s clear that some of those devices must have gone to regular users, too.

Acer is obviously playing the value game with its $199 Wi-Fi-only device. Samsung, too, offers a $249 Chromebook and a more fully featured $449 version. Both of these companies partnered with Google from the early days of the Chromebook program. Now, however, Lenovo is also getting in the game with its $429 ThinkPad X131e Chromebook, which will go on sale later this month. It’s unlikely that Lenovo would enter this market if it didn’t see some momentum for Chromebooks, too.

It’s the Crunchies after party and GitHub Co-Founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner is sitting by the front door at Absinthe in San Francisco with the Crunchies statue he had just accepted for best overall startup. The first thing he says? GitHub won the Crunchies Bootstrap Award in 2009.

But this year, it’s not about being a grassroots startup. It’s about GitHub winning it all and making it clear:  This enterprise movement is for real and that monkey on the table proves it.

But let’s not be contrived here. GitHub won that monkey not just for its enterprise push. Preston-Werner said it’s a huge market but the movement’s earliest flickers started as a developer movement that dovetailed with the app boom and cloud computing, embodied in Amazon Web Services. Developers hack away to build the new things that make this new data age so different. Preston-Werner said every startup at the Crunchies uses GitHub in some way, and I am sure he is right.