This week, Ello puts an ad blocker on its company, Stitcher gets sewn in with Deezer and one bad Apple turns into two bad weeks.
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.
Exactly one month ago, Apple had a very bad week. Between build quality issues on the iPhone 6, iOS 8 update issues, iCloud and Apple Pay security plus a UNIX bug, life was not good for their customers or the company in the press. One thing we have learned about Apple is that they have a plan for recovering from major public relations disasters; perhaps that is a thing of the past. This week, Apple had another series of PR disasters, many related to the last batch.
We've talked at length about the Xbox One and Microsoft's decision to be indecisive on the path of the console. The good news is that it's finally all coming together, albeit in a slightly altered path than the original. And even though its competition is copying ideas that gamers said they didn't want but somehow are now miraculously loving (and are paying for), there hasn't been a major vision shift for over six months, so I think we've hit our stride. Microsoft's Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, has guided the ship for a while now but sat down with IGN's Podcast Unlocked to talk about some of the confusion and frustration consumers felt after the initial launch of the Xbox One.
We were all curious what was going to happen when Ello ran out of money. An ad-free social networking platform is a noble idea, but pay-for-feature websites have sprung up in the past and have failed, so many were worried about Ello's sustainability. Well, the good news is that Ello has answered both the money question and its promise to remain ad-free.
Over the last few months, we have worked to get our shows into Stitcher. If you don't know what Stitcher is, it is essentially a centralized podcast marketplace. One of the things that makes the platform unique is its growing range of devices on which you can access its content.