This week, Gamescom brings out the true colors of the big two, Xbox original programming might find a new home at Warner Bros. and the FCC might care about your feelings on net neutrality.
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.
As we've talked about on the show, the health tech space is growing so rapidly that government agencies are now afraid of it. That means the industry is doing quite well. It also means we're seeing new and cool ways to implement health features into technology products, as well as some interesting partnerships. This all happened when SMS Audio and Intel joined forces this week to launch a new line of in-ear health headphones.
This week at Gamescom in Germany, we got to see the future plans from Sony and Microsoft for the holiday season and beyond. Specifically, we saw the rebirth of some original ideas, and a little bit of copying and finger-pointing from one of the two.
When the FCC opened up public comments on net neutrality, they were flooded with input. As the deadline, July 15, got closer, they received so many comments that their servers crashed, meaning people wanting to give their input were left in the dark.
A couple weeks ago, Microsoft announced the largest round of layoffs in the company's history. While most of the loss will come from the Nokia division, several other divisions saw big cuts as well. One division seeing a full cut is the Xbox Entertainment Studios. Xbox head Phil Spencer announced that XES, founded only 2 years ago and about to release its first set of original programming, would be disbanded.