Nike Comes Back From the Future With Back to the Future - The UpStream

Leave it to Nike to come out with something that people have been clamoring to make into reality for what seems to be eons now. Nike's factories have been dialed up with some flux capacitors to bring to the world the "Back for the Future" 2011 Nike Mag. Yes, that's right, the shoes from the Back to the Future movie!

Ever since Google discontinued using third party reviews on Places, we all knew it was only a matter of time before they bought their way back to relevance and this week they did just that. After an unsuccessful attempt to initiate a buyout a few years back, Zagat has officially been purchased by Google. This will most certainly change the social review landscape as we know it.

I can't think of any other way to say this other than, Apple won. Yes, you read that correctly. In the battle that was almost destined to go on forever between Apple and Adobe, Apple won. This week, Adobe announced it would be updating its Flash Media Server to version 4.5, which would include an ability for Apple users to finally see Flash content, in a very round-a-bout way.

We've never talked about The Garage from Microsoft here at The UpStream, but it is something worth mentioning. The Garage is an initiative at Microsoft, similar to Google Labs, where employees are encouraged to work in innovative projects. Unlike Google Labs, however, some pretty impressive stuff has come out of The Garage. Most of the projects are eventually integrated into an existing Microsoft project or are used internally to speed development or deployment of said projects. From time to time, however, a project is so unique and so useful that it deserves to stand on its own, and today we have one such project.

In the effort of fairness, Twitter forgetting to trademark "Tweet" happened before Dick Costolo took the reins and began trying to turn Twitter into an actual business. However it doesn't excuse this oversight or the way Twitter is trying to get rights to the "Let Your Ad Meet Tweets" trademark that is held by none other than Twittad.

This weekend's Hackathon in San Francisco showed some really cool, new, innovative tech off to the masses. Specifically, we saw Spotify and Ford team up "unofficially" to show everyone how easy (and how cool) it is to integrate with Ford's voice-activated SYNC system. Spotify was there to explain details on how easy the API and SDK are and to encourage developers to "hack" the in-dash system to make some great apps.