Windows 8 Public Beta Could be Out as Soon as February - 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

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.

Microsoft's recent //build/windows Conference let us have a real good look at what makes Windows 8 the next best operating system. The Developer Preview has been out for a little while now and engineers have been able to come up with some cool, innovative ways to interact with the new OS.

Looking forward into the future, Toyota and Yamaha understand that urban areas will become much more densely populated over the next decade and that population requires reliable and economical transportation capabilities. There are only so many cars that can fit on the road and the forward looking approach Toyota and Yamaha have taken is to focus on small electric vehicles such as bikes and scooters that could play a big role in personal transportation in the future.

Well, it turns out not everyone was so jazzed about the new technology from Path Intelligence, Foot Path, that allows retailers to anonymously track a cell phone's journey through a retail environment. To recap last week's report, The malls, owned and operated by Forest City, Promenade Temecula in Temecula, California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Virginia, were trying out the new technology to survey shoppers behaviors in a way more accurate and anonymous than the old "give us your email and we'll send you a coupon" method.

When Sprint first announced a shift to LTE, we all knew it was a bad sign for Clearwire and their Clear mobile broadband network. Clear, a joint venture with Sprint, Bright House Networks, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, receives almost all of its 9.54 million subscribers through reseller agreements, mostly through Sprint. Well, that business model won't be viable much longer.

Mario has been jumping on our television screens and killing evil woodland creatures for over 25 years now. You would think we would get tired of the same formula of: beautiful princess running a peaceful kingdom of mushroom people in diapers, an evil dragon... turtle... thing decides to kidnap the princess just because he wants to, princess calls out to the four foot tall neighborhood plumber to come to her rescue, he defeats the evil fire-breathing bastard and saves the princess all for one single kiss. Well, apparently, we are not tired of this formula, because Nintendo seems to find a way to make each and every experience fresh and sometimes revolutionary.

With all the news about new tablets constantly bombarding us, it's no surprise that Cisco's own tablet, the Cius, would get lost in the clutter of white noise and dessert treats that are iOS and Android devices. The Cius is also running with Android but Cisco's unique experience is largely ingrained on a deeper level that breeds some interesting and exciting usability in what I would designate a hardcore enterprise tablet. RIM and HP should take note.

It's like we're living the dot-com bust over again and the addage that history repeats itself really is true. Months before some analysts started to doubt the Groupon IPO, we predicted its demise right on our show. As it would turn out, we were right. Groupon's IPO for $10 billion, initially, worked like a champ, however investors have dumped almost all of their stock just as fast as they bought it up. Shares fell from just over $31 to half of that at $16 at the time of this writing. The stock has even seen a low of just under $15, bringing the company's valuation to under $10 billion and leaving no hope for them in the future, or any other Internet company for that matter. Investors are now afraid of the Internet yet again and the financial industry is in shock as if they have no clue why this didn't work. At least Groupon is one of the few companies with a business model.

Just a few short months after Spotify launched in the US, it was already running into a couple of hiccups, outside of getting enough subscribers to the service. Independent and smaller music label talent were both pulling their songs out of the service, claiming that the artists were not making enough off of each song play. To respond, Spotify has tried to make amends with the affected artists.