This week, T-Mobile's doing well, Nintendo's doing poorly and Clearwire's doing worse.
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!
Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.
Last month, we talked about AOL wanting to sell off their patent portfolio for a serious cash injection into the business and just two weeks ago, Microsoft scooped up the patents for over $1 billion. It seems that Facebook wanted a piece of the pie.
The Federal Trade Commission has been building an antitrust case against Google for almost a year now. While Google has remained confident that they have done nothing wrong, decisions like stealing data from competitors, especially those who are unwilling to sell, have given the FTC enough confidence to continue. This week, that confidence encouraged them to hire outside counsel to help them with the upcoming case.
Everyone loves Steve Wozniak, one of three co-founders of Apple Inc. Even if you hate Apple and their products, you can't hate this man. Every time he speaks, the technology world listens, because he is not afraid to say exactly what is on his mind, even when it goes against his former company, which it often does. Recently, in an interview with his autobiography's co-author Gina Smith, and Dan Patterson, Woz talked about his experiences with his newly acquired Nokia Lumia handset running Windows Phone.
This week, Clearwire sent in their Q1 report and the numbers aren't good. For those that haven't been following the Clearwire saga, you can recap it all from the first moment of glory here. Once you've discovered the basics, you can check out how Sprint is pretty much holding the company above water, why Google dropped its stake in the company and why the failed LightSquared deal could have been the best thing to happen to Clearwire.
Over the past year, the FCC has made a lot of questionable decisions. Whether it be denying the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile, blocking LightSquared's LTE network, which they had previously approved, or their decision to only fine Google $25,000 for the Street View disaster, they have been ruffling a lot of feathers, including Congress.
With the launch of the upcoming Wii U, Nintendo is hoping that this will help them recover from a couple of bad months of lackluster sales and 3DS price drops. However, bad news is still looming for Nintendo as they move into the E3 that will either make or break the company.
Nintendo has long made it clear that it believed that downloadable games were something they did not think played into their strengths. In fact, they have continued to prove this belief by focusing on cartridges for the DS and discs for the Wii. They have certainly been left behind by the other two companies, with Microsoft offering many of its titles via download shortly after release, plus their download-only games available in the Xbox Live Marketplace, and Sony offering the PS Vita, the first platform to offer day one digital downloads.
We recently spoke with Avram Piltch, Online Editorial Director for LAPTOP Magazine and host of The Piltch Point, about a rising trend in employment. It turns out, more and more businesses and government agencies are asking for Facebook passwords before hiring new employees. Currently, employment law prevents employers from asking certain questions of their prospects, such as military service history, past employment history, medical background, etc. Their solution is to, instead of asking the questions, get the prospect's Facebook password so they can get the answers without the question.
Would you like a way to stream your music across any device you may have, whether it be Windows 8, Android or iOS? Would it be even better if I told you Microsoft may have something in the works? If you thought this might be something we'd see in the next few years, you will be pleasantly surprised with the news coming out of the Microsoft camp this week.