This week, Facebook has a new social gaming King, Saturday Night Live has a surprising new partner and Betaworks instantly ensures it won't Digg a deeper hole.
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.
We've talked about counterfeiting in the past, with government agencies taking down fake product sites worldwide. Trying to pass off fake merchandise as real is also common when it comes to well-known brands of headphones, like Monster Products and Sennheiser. This week, the UK took down a heavy-hitter in what the country is calling the largest-ever seizure of fake Monster products, among other brands. Michael Reeder has been convicted and sentenced to 30 months in prison on 13 different counts of selling the knock-off products.
Over the past year or so, Zynga has lost a lot: customer enthusiasm, stock value, uniqueness, employees, profit, their strategic partner and even their minds. This quarter they have lost the biggest thing they still had - their title as social gaming king. The salt in the wound is that they lost the title to a small gaming company called King.
Regular readers will remember Betaworks; they were the company that bought and relaunched Digg, regaining market share quickly. This week, the company purchased successful read later service Instapaper, adding another content aggregator to its already impressive portfolio, which already includes Digg and Bitly.
In a move that is both shocking and par for the course, Yahoo announced that their streaming service will become the exclusive home for the Saturday Night Live archives, starting in September. This is definitely good news for Yahoo, who is in the process of jump starting their stalled video streaming services. It is, however, bad news, as well as weird news, for Hulu, who currently has the exclusive rights to online distribution of SNL content.