This week, your assistants are working together, your childhood is becoming relevant again and your personal data could be for sale again.
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.
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.
While there are a lot of markets in the technology sector where the big companies battle, few are as crowded or as competitive as the battle over digital assistants. Cortana, Siri, Alexa and the aptly named Google Assistant all have their places, with secondary services like Samsung's Bixby looking for a space to play. Cortana rules the computer, Alexa rules the smart speaker, Siri rules mobile and Google Assistant is gaining ground in Android.
The last 12 months have been littered with retro gaming products. Nintendo released the NES Classic Edition and announced the upcoming Super NES Classic Edition. Sega, with partner AtGames, released the Classic and Flashback Genesis hardware. Even Atari has throwback hardware available.
If 2016 went down as the year of celebrity deaths, 2017 is going to go down as the year of exposed data. This week, another company exposed customer data to the public - Instagram. The data included users' email addresses and phone numbers, and was exposed because of a flaw in the API, or application programming interface, which is how the Instagram applications receive data.
There is little doubt that Roku is a leader in the streaming platform space. They offer their own hardware, which adds smart capabilities to standard, or older, televisions. In addition, many television manufacturers build Roku technology directly into their sets. At CES 2017, we saw both TCL and Hitachi introduce Roku-powered televisions. It seems, if you want a good experience with native streaming, Roku is the way to go.