When we brought you news of Steve Jobs' displeasure at the stumbling launch of MobileMe, we wondered what was happening in the management structure of the service. The chaps at Valleywag have worked it out, and it's a classic. The guy now in charge of MobileMe, and all of Apple's online services—Eddy Cue—was actually originally in charge of the iTunes Store: the place where service outages really messed up the iPhone 3G's launch. Remember the iPocalypse? Hmmm. That now makes us wonder what happened to Cue's former boss Sina Tamaddon (on the right in the pic) and Rob Schoeben, who was in charge of MobileMe's launch. Did they too get punishment promotions? [Valleywag]

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AP is reporting that the former head of Samsung Lee Kun-hee was convicted today in his US$100 million+ tax-evading slush fund scandal that broke earlier this year. He will receive a suspended sentence (no jail time) and be fined US$109 million. The prosecution was seeking 7 years of jail time and a fine of US$347 million. [AP]

Japanese Performance artist Momoyo Torimitsu built a crawling Japanese businessman robot and took it to the streets of Australia to creep out little kids and turn on weird dudes with camcorders. The bot is her critique on the Japanese salaryman lifestyle and the apparent upcoming Asian economic crash. All we know is that dressing up like a nurse and pulling down an old man's pants in the middle of the street is going to attract some lookey-loos. Oh, and I wouldn't want to scrape along the street with my undies down. Ouch. [Diagonal View via Dvice]

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We were excited for the merger talks between Blockbuster Video and Circuit City, as that union could create a probable entertainment behemoth, and we don't mean like Paula Abdul. Sadly word is coming down that Blockbuster is pulling its... Read More »

After a long hardware-software partnership, Nokia's just announced it's buying out all the remaining shares in Symbian it doesn't already own. The purchase amounts to a whopping US$410 million, and is actually part of a deal between Nokia, AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone to form what's being called the "Symbian Foundation." This is an attempt by the companies to join forces and develop and promote the Symbian OS together. Full press release below.

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Samsung's new P400 Pocket Imager projector is designed mainly for businesspeople on the go, so it's pretty tiny. Inside, its DLP unit is a native 800 x 600 resolution and its LED lighting pushes out 150 lumens, resulting in a 30- to 40-inch display capability with 1000:1 contrast ratio. It takes the standard RGB, composite, S-video and audio inputs, and has two 1-watt speakers. Plus, though it's no pico-projector, it's just 12.7 x 9.4 x 5 cms in size and weighs 860 grams, so it'll carry nicely in your laptop bag. And you know what? Just coz it's businessy doesn't mean it has to look ugly or utilitarian: so Samsung has actually made this thing look pretty good. Available now for US$749, full press release below.

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Henry Nicholas, co-founder of integrated circuits manufacturer Broadcom, has just been charged with spiking the drinks of other technology execs and maintaining a warehouse full of coke, meth and ecstasy. This is the latest incident for Nicholas, who in July 2007, was accused of constructing a sex cave so he could roll hard on ecstasy and properly love his prostitutes. In addition, Nicholas, along with co-founder Henry Samueli and CFO William Ruehle were charged last month on multiple counts of conspiracy, options backdating, falsifying reported income and securities fraud (BORING!). And call me a dreamer, but I'm still waiting for allegations involving a midget to work their way into this equation. Checkout Valleywag for the full indictment document.[NYT]

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Following the Wind's success, and further advancing in the mini-laptop collective hysteria, Micro-Star International is planning a thinner version for business people, as well as a new, completely unknown smaller-than-a-mini-laptop mobile Internet device. According to Andy Tung, the business Wind will re-use the components of its predecessor, but focus on design:

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Looks like Microsoft isn't completely ready to let its dreams of a deal with Yahoo die yet. Despite calling the purple giant's demands "excessive" and retiring its US$47.5 billion bid just two weeks ago, Microsoft is now saying that it's discussing an "alternative transaction." Apparently something has changed enough in the last few days for Microsoft to resume negotiations, like a scorned lover lured back by a "I promise everything will be different, baby. I'll really try to make things work this time around!" [BBC]