EA Lays Off Hundreds of Employees - 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!

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.

Electronic Arts might not be doing well, even with the added revenue from their Season Ticket from their EA Sports titles. After completing a handful of major games last year, like Star Wars and Battlefield 3, the studio is going to be laying off 500 to 1,000 employees, which is roughly between 5 to 10 percent of the entire workforce.

It's very rare that we simply come across a "feel good" story in the tech space. Somebody's always up to something mischievous or a company is under scrutiny for unethical practices. Seldom do we have an organization that is doing something good for the environment. This week, I am proud to say that we have some good news.

This has been a tough week in the cosplay space with a lot of negative attention brought in from a particularly negative individual. Because I do not want to give him any more press, however, I have a positive story from the cosplay world this week, and it involves the police and Batman.

Since our interview at CES 2012, The Wireless Power Consortium has announced a major update to the Qi standard for wireless charging. The standard, which originally allowed for charging over a 5mm distance, has now been rewritten to allow for a charging distance of 40mm.

If you haven't had an opportunity yet to check out the wonderful new Microsoft toys like Windows Phone or the developer preview of Windows 8, you have surely missed out on some innovative happenings! More importantly, you've missed out on our favorite game, Wordament. The multiplayer, social version of the board game Boggle has taken off at a rapid pace and has seen millions of users since its launch in September 2011 on Windows Phone.

Two years ago we heard from Verizon that they were going to slow installs of FiOS nationwide, followed by the announcement last year that any installs not currently active would not be continued. This week, Verizon has decided that their marketing might actually be doing the trick, and has decided to reactive a dark market - Tampa, Florida.

Google has had a lot of trouble with YouTube since it was first purchased in 2006. It started with a lawsuit from Viacom and has progressed to RIAA and other content owners, all upset about their protected media being uploaded to the service without their permission. Google has made agreements with nearly everyone, allowing them to follow standard US Internet law, saying that they are not responsible for the content uploaded to their site, but are required to pull anything that is infringement.