This week, Best Buy loses its employees, Digg loses its value and Sony loses the concept of "new console."
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.
Last week, Facebook settled the score with Yahoo, which turned out to be the best thing for Yahoo. The company was able to cross-license patents Facebook acquired from Microsoft and also put Yahoo into a mutual advertising partnership with the social networking giant, allowing them to form a platform that would bring Yahoo content onto Facebook. Yahoo is continuing the run of good fortune for them as this week they've entered into another deal, this time with Clear Channel.
As we predicted, it looks like Samsung isn't bothered by Microsoft designing their own tablet. As discussed just a couple weeks ago, Microsoft also announced that they would not be making their own smartphones and instead were happy with Nokia as a manufacturer and wanted to continue its relationship with Samsung for WinPho8.
Have you ever wondered where our tax dollars end up going? Well, luckily for you I love to cover that kind of stuff. Just under three years ago, I wrote about the Air Force buying 2,200 PlayStation 3 consoles for the building of a supercomputer, bringing their total to 2,536 units. If you thought the $118,000 used to spend on Sony's gaming machine was a lot, you better prepare yourself for this news.
A little over a year ago, Best Buy announced they would be shrinking their store footprints and moving to smaller, Best Buy Mobile locations in order to keep costs down. Well, it appears that cutting the size of the stores has not been enough and now the workforce cuts will commence. Best Buy will be eliminating 2,400 jobs, which comes out to 1.4 percent of Best Buy's positions. It is also being reported that the reduction will happen immediately.
While Sony readies their next generation console, Orbis, it appears that they are also preparing to launch a 3rd generation of their current console, the PlayStation 3. Much like the second generation, currently available, the new model will be significantly thinner than its predecessor.
Just about everyone on the Internet has had some sort of interaction with social networking pioneer, Digg. If you are reading this on our website, you can even see its integration at the bottom of the article. Just because you know of it, however, does not mean that you use it. That is the problem that has led to this week's decision to sell the remaining assets of the company to Betaworks for a mere $500,000. Compared to the $35 million MySpace sold for, that is pretty insulting.
Since its inception, Hulu has been known as the place for Americans to watch American programming. This is not to say there isn't foreign language programming available. In fact, Hulu has more anime available than Manga Entertainment, as well as Spanish language programming. What Hulu has never offered, however, is exclusive foreign language programming.