Valve to Bring Non-game Apps to Steam Starting September 5th - 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.

I cannot believe I am writing about this again, but here we are. Another Chinese teenager, a 17-year-old boy, sold his kidney on the black market for about $3,500 US, which he then used to purchase an iPad and an iPhone. Yes, this kid underwent surgery in order to purchase a couple of meh consumer electronic devices. As I mentioned, this is not the first time I have written about this. There was the first kidney harvest and the virginity auction, both for Apple products in China last year.

For those of you with children who have a Netflix account and have been keeping up with how well the company's been doing lately, if you own an Xbox 360, you're going to be enjoying this piece of news from Major Nelson this week. All of my Xbox Live Gold subscribers with active Netflix subscriptions should have received an update if you've accessed the app sometime during the week. The update contains a recent update to the streaming service called "Just for Kids."

This week we have news of another breach in the gaming world, however it is not in any way, shape or form related to Sony and their handicapping outage last year. Instead, the victim is Blizzard Entertainment and their Battle.net online gaming network. Blizzard, makers of StarCraft, World of Warcraft and Diablo, has had their internal network security compromised and the company has issued emails to customers today. Blizzard has said the email went out to all customers who have used Battle.net, however at the time of this writing, my inbox has not received any such notification. Perhaps I wasn't affected?

I didn't think anybody but Apple fans would be upset when the Microsoft Surface was announced along with the stunning new accessories. Microsoft beat the first wave of apprehension when they said they welcomed other manufacturers to step their games up against the Surface, and Samsung was quick to announce they'd be launching a Windows 8 RT tablet. All is not well in the Microsoft manufacturer world, though. The last company in my mind that would seem to have an issue, however, would be Acer, but that's exactly who is causing a stir in the tech industry this week as they have told Microsoft to "think twice" about the upcoming flagship Surface tablet.

It has been a rough couple of weeks for Zynga. Though the largest producer of Facebook games, their earnings report sucked this quarter, their future products have not impressed and their $200 million OMGPOP acquisition has not exactly gone as planned. The company has begun to resort to licensing tactics, including a Draw Something-branded TV show to try and keep the lights on. Combine that with an insider trading investigation and a lawsuit from EA over the similarities between their new game The Ville and EA's The Sims Social.

Google has, once again, changed their search algorithm, but it's not for the normal reasons. Normally when these changes happen it is to enhance their search result relevancy; this time it is to reduce their search result relevancy. In response to pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Google will now suppress relevant search results from websites which have had copyright claims against them.

Game company Valve has always been known to do things a little differently. With innovations like Steam and amazing FPS titles like Counter-Strike and Half-Life, it seems as if everything they do turns into something great. Since earlier this year, we were curious as to what was up the company's sleeve to be the next big thing. Fans worldwide were let down when told that there would be no Steam Box or other announcement at E3, even though we found out more details about Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.