This week, Xbox 360's killing the competition, Facebook revives your trust with their new privacy enhancements and HP's raising the dead. Plus, we've outlived our first sponsor!
Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.
With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!
Jon is a F5 Live co-host and UpStream contributor as well as the Chief Cash Officer of PLuGHiTz Corporation. We don't know how he wears so many hats so well or how he still finds time to feed his need for all things tech but some questions are best left unanswered. If you're up for a challenge go find him on Xbox Live @shinobiJon and if you figure him out...let us know.
Ever since Larry Page reclaimed the reigns of Google a few months ago, he has been making a lot of changes to get the company back to their roots. He has even tried to regain the fun start-up feel by mathematical constants vs regular whole numbers on an important auction. This week he is working on trimming some of the corporate fat by closing some of the many worthless Google projects.
Since AT&T's announced plans to purchase T-Mobile USA, there has been a lot of talk about why and how. What are AT&T's real reasons for the purchase? Will the federal government allow said merger? This week we got the answer to the last question.
I think we all remember the iPhone 4 prototype that was lost and the controversy around the termination of an employee for showing an iPad prototype to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. I don't think anyone would expect another prototype issue to arise, especially one that is exactly the same as the first one, right after the legal battle has ended. Apple lost an iPhone 5 prototype handset at a bar. Yeah, that's right... another prototype, another bar.
After losing the iPhone 4 prototype I suppose it just felt right to make the same mistake by losing the iPhone 5 prototype... in another bar of course. Now, only 2 days after losing the iPhone 5 prototype a Genius Bar employee at an Apple Store in Samford Connecticut has probably started a new trend by giving a customer a hard drive with confidential information.
It seems like it was just yesterday that HP went crazy and decided to kill off its $1.2 billion acquisition by starting a fire sale on the TouchPads just six weeks after launch, practically giving them away at $99 and $149. Regardless of the rhyme and reason for the decisions made, which we will discuss on our show, HP seems astonished that the move garnered such attention and caused a sellout in almost every store that carried the product.
While the Star Wars Xbox 360 won't be out until next year, the newly announced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 special edition bundle will be available November 8th. Announced at Activision's Call of Duty XP event, the bundle will include a lot of custom-designed hardware and interactions.
It's been a bumpy ride for Facebook in terms of privacy management. At times they have taken liberties by changing default settings like back in 2009 and even though there have been constant complaints from users wanting more simplified privacy management for year now, their attempts at doing so have been unsuccessful at best. This is why the new changes that recently took place are a bit surprising. Facebook's concept about how the user interacts with their entire profile is changing, seemingly for the better.
After acquiring Blockbuster and deciding to keep almost all of their remaining stores open for some strange reason, Dish Network has decided to launch a Blockbuster streaming service to compete with the likes of Netflix.