This week, Facebook's making money, Nintendo's making changes and Microsoft's making waves.
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.
While HP's future may be a little less confusing now that they've figured out what to do with webOS, the company is still having to deal with problems. Executives have been leaving since last year and it is now in the hands of CEO Meg Whitman to turn this ship around.
Over the past few months, the interest in micro computers has grown. For users, the ability to bring a computer with them everywhere they go and use it on any screen and have their environment stay exactly the same is useful. For developers, it is even better - no need to have your development environment installed on different computers and hope the settings are the same (which they NEVER are). Even The Pirate Bay has an intriguing way to use them.
After learning that Philip Falcone, CEO of LightSquared's top investor, Harbinger Capital, may step down as public head of the company earlier in the month, we figured the tough times for the company would be over or at least kept to a minimum. Well, something rare has happened and we were wrong. I know, I'm shocked, too.
Virgin Atlantic has always been known to find new, creative ways to market and promote the brand. With the boss Sir Richard Branson leading the way (sometimes in his Zulu warrior costume), an occasional April Fool's joke will usually end up coming from his mind. More recently, the airline has started to offer ice cubes shaped like his head. Virgin Atlantic CEO Steve Ridgway said it was so Branson could be with his guests "in spirit."
While the Wii U made a splash with some of my co-hosts at last year's E3, I knew that what we had seen demonstrated was not nearly a final product. In fact, it was guaranteed that the hardware on display was possibly even pre-alpha, in that we never saw the console itself (and still have not). It all felt very Palm Pre debut, not ready for manufacturing yet. That said, this week some new photos were leaked of a possible release candidate for the new Wii U controller, and the alterations are pleasant.
The road to an initial public offering (IPO) has not been an easy or straight-forward one for Facebook. With a lawsuit from Yahoo!, purchasing Instagram for $1 billion, then patents from Microsoft, all requiring them to miss their target date, the road as been a little rocky.
If you haven't been keeping up with what the Xbox has to offer, you've been missing out on some quality entertainment options. After all, Xbox has been all about entertainment since E3 of last year. Back in October, Xbox LIVE announced a new video lineup and we couldn't wait to get all of the 40 world-class TV and entertainment providers on our consoles. Unfortunately, it took a long time to get all of the channels actually added to LIVE. Up until December, we were missing over half of the providers and we had to wait all the way through April to get all of them except two, those two being Bravo and Manga Entertainment. For those keeping score at home, the guys here at the show have been very excited to get Manga on Xbox LIVE and it felt as though Microsoft was listening to our show, noticing our excitement and were just simply playing with our emotions by delaying its launch.