Google Reader's Makeover - The UpStream

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!

Jon is a F5 Live co-host and UpStream contributor as well as the Chief Cash Officer of PLuGHiTz Corporation. We don't know how he wears so many hats so well or how he still finds time to feed his need for all things tech but some questions are best left unanswered. If you're up for a challenge go find him on Xbox Live @shinobiJon and if you figure him out...let us know.

Allante - also well known as Wolff - is the newest member and co-host for PLuGHiTz Live! Radio. A gifted artist, he is usually found drawing up a character or two or sketching up whatever comes to mind. Do not think that he is not a hardcore gamer because he is about as hardcore as it gets! His favorites range from fighting games to RPGs, adventure and even a racing game here and there. Fighting games are his forte and he relays this message for all who oppose: You mess with the Wolff and you get the fangs!

XB360 - Enigmatic Wolff

PSN - Tsukuyomi_Okami

I would imagine that by now everyone has heard about Apple's iPhone 4s, and its acquired voice command software, Siri. Siri has been such a hit that Android developer Dextra has released a new app for Android entitled Iris. The company obviously has a great sense of humor because the name is an anagram, which stands for Intelligent Rival Imitation of Siri and is, itself, Siri spelled backwards.

We all know that the era of hard drives is coming to an end, replaced by the quicker, more power-efficient solid state drives. Between a technology shift and a number of conspiracies and scandals, Samsung and Hitachi have decided to close up shop on their hard drive businesses and sell them off to the competition.

This has not been a good time at all for HP. First, their TouchPad disaster caused the CEO, Leo Apotheker, to be replaced. The new exec, eBay's former CEO, Meg Whitman, said she was going to stay the course and continue HP's plans to restructure and sell-off it's computer business.

The future is looking bright for people looking for an excuse to touch themselves and other ad hoc surfaces with purpose, literally. Chris Harrison of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft researchers Hrvoje Benko and Andrew Wilson have been focusing their efforts on creating OmniTouch technology that expands touchscreen surfaces beyond the normal array of touchscreen devices like the phones and tablets that we have all become so accustomed to. They realized that the average human hand has more surface area than most touchscreen phones and that there were a lot of usable surfaces already existing in the real world, like your hand, coffee tables and notepads, that could be put to better use. According to Benko,

Four months ago at E3 2011, Sony, while trying to recover from its breach bonanza, gave us a peek at their upcoming 24" 3DTV that could display two different images, simultaneously. We learned that we would see this TV sometime around the holidays and it would sell for $499, but that was it.

The PS Vita first came to our attention in January of this year when it became known that Sony was working on its next generation portable (NGP) device that hopefully wouldn't not be a PSP re-hash... again. We got a glimpse of what we could expect the hardware to be but were left in the dark as to whether Sony would actually improve the device besides beefing up the hardware or not.

Over the past few months, Google has been incredibly active. The company has had comical auction bids, several rounds of product closures, as well as a visual redesign of current products and launches of new products. This has all been since co-founder Larry Page's return to the company in an attempt to make Google profitable and relevant again.

Isn't your new HDTV exciting? All of those 1920 pixels of amazingness makes watching television and movies fun again, right? Well, I have some news for you that you should NOT tell to your TV. The ITU Study Group on Broadcasting Service has announced that thye have come to an agreement on most of the specs on what Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV) will be.