This week, AT&T announces its next generation cities, your phone will allow you to catch ghosts and Redbox might be the reason you lose digital downloads.
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.
Over the past few months, a lot of discussion has surrounded the future of cellular technology, the 5th generation, or 5G networks. Intel was showing off the possibilities at CES 2018, with their entire booth being powered by a localized 5G network. At the Winter Olympic Games, Samsung used the opportunity to show off the possibilities with localized 5G setup around the venues and the Olympic Village. While it's clear that the technology is ready for small-form setups, a lot of question has surrounded whether or anyone is ready for a large deployment test.
The last 2 years have been good for augmented reality and mixed reality content. From holographic medical tools to the infamous Pokémon GO, there are many ways to interact with augmented reality content. With Microsoft, Apple and Google all having AR development kits, making the process of adding information to the real world far easier than just 2 years ago, more of this type of content is expected to come to market.
There's no question that the technology topic of this year has been cryptocurrency and blockchain. For the tech enthusiasts in the industry, the idea of decentralizing the data and processing is very appealing. Moving the transaction processing away from "traditional banks" is a draw for the market, but it is also turning out to be a problem.
Often times, when a company files suit over copyright claims, the end result is predictable. For example, when Disney sued Redbox for reselling the digital distribution codes that are bundled with DVDs, most of the industry saw what was going to happen: Redbox was going to stop selling the codes. Obviously, the codes come as a package deal with the DVDs, so it should be a slam dunk, right?