• Samsung runs away from Japan

Samsung, the huge electronics related South Korean company, has really ran away from the Japanese market after deciding to stop selling gadgets in Japan directly. While most of their products already escaped retail stores some time ago, it was just recently that the Korean version of the Samsung website also got vanished – aka the “final move”.

According to Samsung, the reason for getting lost was the following:

We judged direct sales to individual consumers are less profitable than business-to-business sales

In other words, they weren’t making as much money as they would like. Another factor that probably contributed to this decision was the high number of tech companies in Japan, which results in having more competition.

But people on Japan shouldn’t get crazy if they still want to buy Samsung products, because other companies are still going to sell them, such as SoftBank which will provide cellphones.

• FreeRice – Play an online game, learn, and win rice

FreeRice can’t be considered tech news per se, but the whole idea is so brilliant that I have to share it with you.

Basically it is an online game in which you can win grains of rice that are afterwards used by the United Nations World Food Program to feed other people.

The word related game is simple, there is a main word and 4 options for its meaning, if you get the answer right, 10 grains of rice are won, if not, you can try again. There are different vocabulary levels that keep increasing in difficulty as long as you give the correct answer.

Go ahead and try it out, it is an easy way to help others while playing a game that is suppose to make you smarter, or at least get to know new words. I just donated 60 grains!

PS – Google and the “define: word” command is a good way to cheat in this game.

Source – Yahoo News and Reuters

Guest post by Tiago of Gadgetizer