Google Reaches Out to Non-Disney - 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.

There's not much I can say about this. I ran across a video from a YouTuber by the name of GELTONZ who posted a gameplay clip of him playing Joy Ride for the Kinect. Normal enough, you would think, except he showed himself sitting down, keeping his hands still, not moving at all, and the game was being played for him!

Google Wave is not as dead as we expected. Google and Novell have submitted to the Apache Software Foundation that they take over the majority of codebase from Google Wave. While the move is a bit odd, it isn't a huge surprise.

I don't know about all of you, but we here at the show love the merger of Sirius and XM and all the cool new stuff they have to offer. But who knew that Sirius Canada and XM Canada didn't merge yet after the US counterparts have merged well over a year ago? I know I didn't. This week, the two companies announced their plans to merge forces to create a super satellite sound alliance!

Everyone asked for it and I suppose after Hulu announced its official price tier for Hulu Plus, it was time for Netflix to make its move.

Have you encountered a vehicle that has WiFi built-in? We did last year at CES 2010 but not really in the wild. It seems to be similar to the iPad (have any of you seen one of THOSE in the wild?). The reason is because this year only 174,000 units have shipped worldwide. Not a terribly impressive number.

As far as flash drives go you can certainly say that the Super Talent USB 3.0 RAIDDrive is impressive and not just because of the many capital letters that scream "performance!" at you like a Powerthrist commercial. As the name subtly suggests this isn't a mere flash drive, its a RAIDDrive, that consists of 2 SSDs (Solid State Drives) in a Raid 0 configuration. USB 2.0 would not be able to keep up with the 371MB/sec read speeds and 185MB/sec write speeds which is why you will need USB 3.0 and their UAS Protocol driver.

Microsoft's community czar, Stephen Toulouse, has had an interesting career. It seems he steps in it every time he appears in the public, either in person or in writing. I believe we all remember the gamer who was banned for living in a town named Fort Gay.

The 5 year wait for the 5th release in the epic Gran Turismo franchise might very well have come to an end. The game has shipped out to retailers and there is even some online game play footage. But let's not pop the champaign just yet. Anyone who has followed the franchise at all will not be able to kick their Perkaset addictions until it's actually in their PS3 and being played, by them. Especially after the recent release date shenanigans that Sony and Polyphony have pulled. Also, as Scott mentioned to me, we saw footage of Spore 2 years before the game actually released.

It's that time of year where turkey, relentless TV ads, and a rainforest's worth of junk mail floods mailboxes across the country in an effort to get "out of the red and into the black." Traditional media services have always been the driving force behind the millions upon millions of dollars spent every year on Black Friday advertising and as more time goes by social media is finding a growing importance with their role.

Take a moment to think about how many commercials you've seen throughout your life. Now try to quantify that number in terms of time spent watching them. I'm sure that number would be quite high unless you're 4 years old, in which case you probably aren't reading this. From a consumer perspective we develop a love-hate relationship with them and for a little while viewers of web content have enjoyed much less exposure and generally more relevantly targeted ads. This could all come to a swift end shortly due to some revealing research.

I know we haven't really discussed Google TV and their happenings, but we figured everyone understood that it could be a really cool product but somehow Google would find another way to "implement now, fix later" and it would fail something epic. Miraculously, big box retailers, the media, the press and everyone else had other plans and have taken Google TV under their wings and tried to make it fly. I guess the word "Google" in Google TV didn't give away that it was made by the same corporation that couldn't even get Buzz to buzz.

With Google TV taking a big hit this week, they are looking for other ways to bolster their video streaming offerings. They believe that an agreement with Miramax studios would be a quick and easy way to accomplish this goal.