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Samsung appoints Kwon Oh-hyun new CEO

Samsung has replaced CEO Choi Gee-sung with the head of its components operation.

Samsung's components business chief, Kwon Oh-hyun, will now head up the company as chief executive officer. Kwon will continue to run Samsung's component business, but will now be tasked with handling "corporate-wide affairs," Samsung said today. However, the presidents of Samsung's TV and appliances and telecom and IT divisions will not report to Kwon.

Although Choi is no longer chief executive, he hasn't been let go. Quite the contrary, he will now head up the Samsung Group Corporate Strategy Office, a … Read more

The best OHs at SXSW?

AUSTIN, Texas--"We can't get in? Whatever, that's the douchiest party," began the incensed would-be reveler at South by Southwest. And then the quick about-face. "Wait, can we get in?"

Or this geek gem: "Can you unplug it? I want to see the ports."

Or maybe "'We're a consumer-facing data driven multiplatform Web-based solution with wide market appeal.' 'Huh?' 'We send people cat videos.'"

These and many more are "overheards," the famous "OH:" Twitter convention that can sometimes leave you speechless at the fact that … Read more

Dutch court tells Pirate Bay to scram, or else

A Dutch court has ruled in favor of antipiracy foundation BREIN, giving three of The Pirate Bay's co-founders 10 days to block traffic to and from the Netherlands, effectively revoking access to its residents.

According to blog TorrentFreak, the suit goes against The Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, all of whom were reportedly not even aware of the case. As a response they sent back a letter to the court to get it dismissed, and are currently seeking an appeal with legal representation.

The ruling, which took place on Thursday, will put a … Read more

Move over, Guitar Hero, it's Oh-No Banjo

A couple of years ago, I bought an Xbox 360 for the sole purpose of playing Rock Band. I'd played it a few times and fell in love. I also love the Guitar Hero series and most of the other music-themed modern games out there. But sometimes things can go too far, and this might be one of those times.

Oh-No Banjo is a Guitar Hero-based game students from the Rochester Institute of Technology cooked up for the school's president, Bill Destler. He happens to be a hard-core collector of antique banjos from the 1840s to 1920s (as … Read more

Ubiquitous Netbooks, a cheap Acer, and WiMax cometh: The week in laptops

So, I'm thinking about changing the name of this feature to "The week in Netbooks." Seriously. This week we had rumors and then confirmation of Asus' "premium" Netbook, the Eee PC S101. The company also confirmed that 2009 will bring a touch-screen Eee PC. Meanwhile, the MSI Wind made its way to retail store shelves even as rumors of its successor, the Wind U120, made their way to the Web. And software maker CyberLink hopped on the bandwagon, announcing a Linux version of its PowerDVD movie player so you can watch films on that tiny … Read more

11 troubled Web companies: The next Kozmos?

"We are going to lose some good companies." That's the warning cry from investors in tech these days.

Some we won't miss, of course: the lame, me-too, or single-featured "products" masquerading as businesses. But be prepared. Some Web 2.0 start-ups that are well-loved by many are in serious danger of falling off the cliff.

The problem is that being loved is no guarantee for success. Even being used isn't enough. Remember Kozmo, the munchie messenger service from the last bubble? Not a person who used it didn't love it. In the interest of building a user base, the company was OK with losing money on every transaction in its early days. But when the time came for it to become a real business, it was too late. It couldn't transition to a viable company, and it folded. It was a tragedy.

Here, in no particular order, are 11 online services companies that could face a similar fate. Several of them are 2008 Webware 100 winners. Like I said, popularity isn't enough.

Twitter Although well-used by many and even relied upon by some ( like me), Twitter has yet to turn on a revenue model. It's not like the company would lose users, if it set up a minor advertising strategy as a test; people want to see the company make some money. Please, Twitter, turn on the revenue before it's too late.

Meebo This is one of the coolest online communication companies I've seen. I like its products and services. But the revenues for running branded chat rooms cannot be all that large. Meebo belongs under the wing of a larger company like Facebook or Microsoft, but with Meebo's expensive valuation and the coming cutback in M&A, I fear that its exits may be blocked.

TripIt A very useful service for organizing travel information. Wait, travel? Who's going to be traveling more often during the economic storm we're heading into? People are going to sit at home on their mattresses filled with cash, teleconference instead of go on business trips, and take vacations in their backyards. I fear for this company and other clever travel start-ups.

… Read more

What happens when Google's Chrome crashes?

Maybe I give off some unusual electrical impulse, but whatever the reason, I'm the guy who can crash any computer or application in no time flat. Hard drives melt down under my fingers, I get a couple of BSODs a week at least, and naturally, I've even managed to crash Google's new supposedly super-stable browser, Chrome.

That in itself isn't terribly noteworthy, but I did appreciate the humorous message Chrome gave me (while trying to preview an upcoming CNET review), so I screengrabbed it for your viewing pleasure.

Slashdot parent company experiences overnight outage

UPDATE (6:04 a.m. PT): SourceForge's sites are back up. UPDATE (1:27 p.m. PT): Comment from SourceForge was added.

On Wednesday morning, there appeared to be some sort of outage at SourceForge Inc., parent company of iconic geek news forum Slashdot and retailer ThinkGeek (among others). Neither SourceForge nor the sites it operates were accessible at 5:30 a.m. PT. According to SourceForge, it was an emergency maintenance window that "caused an unanticipated network outage."

As they might have said at Slashdot rival Fark, "Everybody panic!"

Performance monitoring firm Pingdom reported that Slashdot was down … Read more

Charles Darwin + Audiobook = Next-generation torture device

Boing Boing has alerted us to a public-domain audio recording of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection that you can download and plunk onto your iPod. Now, I did a bit of the History of Science thing in college, and I must have taken at least four seminars in which Origin of Species was on the syllabus. I can consequently tell you that this is the most boring book ever written.

Yes, it's difficult to express just how influential a work of research and literature it was, and it's still obviously … Read more