Gmail Back in Beta - The UpStream

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.

Netflix has been doing some great things as of late. On top of them already hitting the $2 billion mark and adding an exclusive deal with Disney, they've been getting help indirectly from their main competitor, Hulu, who has seen some serious troubles in recent weeks.

It seems like every week I have Spotify updates for everyone. Starting in January, I mentioned Spotify would make its way from Europe to the US very soon. So far, the streaming music company has finalized a deal with Sony and EMI and has even hinted at arriving the the US sooner than we think. The only problem holding them back was the ability to land a significant deal with another big record label, which would force analysts to consider Spotify as a serious competitor. That is, until now.

Mobile Apps started to become advertised around 2007 along with the iPhone and the concept was adopted very quickly resulting in mobile apps spreading to almost every mobile OS imaginable. Today iOS has over 350,000, Android has around 270,000, BlackBerry boasts over 65,000 and let's not forget about WebOS or Windows Phone 7 who are continuously climbing the ladder. According to Forrester Research, revenue generated by customers purchasing apps will hit $38 billion in 4 years. The current revenue generated is around $5.5 billion, meaning that Forrester expects a 7 fold increase by 2015. They also attribute part of the mobile apps future success to a new category of apps that will store information via the cloud making the information easily accessible on many devices. There are already some Apps utilizing the cloud such as Evernote, but the trend is just beginning.

Sometimes in wandering the Interwebz, I encounter things I just need to share. This week, I encountered a video where a man with WAY too much time on his hands decided to create a virtual machine in VMWare and try to install every version of Microsoft Windows, in order, straight through and see what happened.

We've talked in the past about the benefits and issues from Android's lack of approval process for apps. This week, the fears we had about the process came true when Google was forced to remove 50+ apps from the Android Marketplace for containing malware. Yes, there are now distributed viruses and bots for Android.

Here's a story for the crazy bin - according to sources inside RIM, the company is planning on launching its BlackBerry Messenger service on Android and iOS devices in the near future. My first thought in hearing this news was that it seemed like nonsense. BBM is what keeps BlackBerry handsets in customers' hands at this point. It's certainly not handset design, minus the Torch, or OS design.

There's not a whole lot so say here that isn't already in the title but it only took about 4 hours for the R4i team to hack the 3DS after launch. You can't play pirated 3DS games on the device yet but you can play Gameboy Color and original DS games so things are starting off pretty well but you can expect Nintendo to push out a firmware update that will set R4i back temporarily. They did offer up an explanation about their accomplishment on their YouTube channel,

Sony continues to turn up the heat on GeoHot this week when a Federal Magistrate, Joseph Spero, allowed Sony access to sensitive information concerning GeoHot and anyone who seems to have had contact with him in almost any way. If you have visited GeoHot's website anytime after 2009 then congratulations because odds are you will be included somewhere in the IP logs, server logs and account records they are legally obligated to turn over to Sony.

This isn't the first we've heard Microsoft grumbling about IE6, which is at least just as annoying to them as it is developers. There's nothing like designing a website for IE8 when up to 34% of your audience might sill be viewing it with IE6. It is also annoying when companies cling to IE6 for fear of their enterprise applications not working properly. I do recognize that the UI is much brighter and more user friendly with IE8 but that's still no reason to cling to the darkness with IE6.

Do you remember when Google first launched Gmail and EVERYONE had to have one? Well, many of those people experienced another of Google's failures when 150,000 Gmail accounts were reset to new. All of these people started their day signing into their Gmail accounts to find only the "Welcome to Gmail" message. Years of emails, Gtalk chat logs, contacts and anything else stored in their accounts - gone.

Media analysts are very strange people. In a market where competition drives creativity and uniqueness, they are quick to downplay certain companies yet promote others as revolutionary and breakthrough before they even launch, or better yet, when they weren't doing too well and relaunch. Spotify is an example of the former and the new and improved Amazon Prime is an example of the latter.