This week, BlackBerry has got new ideas, Xbox has got new partners and Windows has got new problems.
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!
Allante - also well known as Wolff - is the newest member and co-host for PLuGHiTz Live! Radio. A gifted artist, he is usually found drawing up a character or two or sketching up whatever comes to mind. Do not think that he is not a hardcore gamer because he is about as hardcore as it gets! His favorites range from fighting games to RPGs, adventure and even a racing game here and there. Fighting games are his forte and he relays this message for all who oppose: You mess with the Wolff and you get the fangs!
XB360 - Enigmatic Wolff
PSN - Tsukuyomi_Okami
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.
After The Great Netflix Debacle of Late 2011, the company has managed to minimize its losses and keep itself under the media radar. At this point, that's probably the best thing for the company, as they look to recover from the damage inflicted.
Friday, Facebook make a pretty major move, introducing Facebook Timeline to all brand pages. Unlike personal timelines, which have not yet forced their way into the lives of those who do not want it, brand pages have all been converted. Perhaps Facebook learned their lesson from making it semi-optional with personal profiles, requiring them to now maintain two separate sets of profile code for personal pages.
It is no secret that Research in Motion and BlackBerry are in trouble. They have had trouble selling their PlayBook tablets, even having to recall some and they are losing marketshare at an alarming rate, not helped by a massive outage last year. Add to that a long-overdue and constantly teased BlackBerry OS 10, also not without issue and the company's inability to get people to upgrade to OS 7-powered devices and you end up with a new CEO.
As we talked about on the show a couple weeks ago, Microsoft would not be talking about anything that has to do with a new Xbox at this year's E3. We mentioned how if and when they decided to talk about something new would be about the same time Sony would follow suit.
As promised, I bring an important, albeit small update from Maxis and EA regarding their upcoming SimCity title that was announced at GDC a few weeks ago.
With piracy in the news constantly right now because of the recent takedown of Megaupload and the future of piracy in the sky, now is possibly the worst time for a new company to try and make a name for itself in the piracy game. Desktops on Demand, however, is trying to do just that.
Since October, Microsoft has been boosting its media partners that are available on the Xbox 360 and even though all of the partners they announced were not available when the Xbox Dashboard was refreshed, we were promised we'd see the entire list at some point. While the news surely wasn't encouraging, a few days after the refresh Xbox Live was given another bunch of media apps that we were able to play with, however we still were missing around ten that were on Microsoft's initial list. Then, in mid-February, the 360 was given another batch of apps, yet we still did not see Bravo, HBO Go, Vevo, Xfinity and Manga Entertainment and some of those weren't even on the "Coming Soon" list.