Could a $100 Xbox 360 Revitalize Hardware Sales? - 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!

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.

Being so close to E3 2012, it wouldn't be right if there wasn't any gaming talk. Unfortunately, Valve says there won't be product announcement talk at E3. I guess we have to wait some more to hear more news about the Steam Box, as expected. We had hopes though and now I have to return the disco ball I rented for the celebration of new products being announced as Valve confirmed the news this week.

While Sprint may have secured a deal with 15 states for four years, things are also looking up for Verizon. We've known the United States has been working on being able to text in your 911 emergencies for quite some time now and Verizon has stepped up to help build the nationwide text system for the Next Generation 911 upgrade project. The company has selected TeleCommunication Systems Inc to assist them with the build out, which will include upgrades that will also increase the accuracy of the location data the 911 dispatchers receive for the calls.

AT&T decided this week that it's a good idea to help eliminate cell phone theft. The company has launched a new section of their website that not only helped customers be better informed on protecting their devices, but will also, in time, be able to shut down the stolen device. The site, att.com/stolenphone first tells all users to put a password on your mobile device and change it often. It also has information on the security apps available and features a tutorial on how to back up contacts on a SIM card.

The FCC's suspension of the waiver granted to LightSquared to deploy their own, privately funded 4G LTE Advanced network has led to an interesting turn of events in the tech world. LightSquared has since responded to the FCC, claiming the FCC has violates LightSquared's rights. Because of the suspension, Sprint had to look elsewhere for their 4G LTE network and has dumped truckloads of cash into Clearwire, who might have been their next option, only for the company to lose money in Q1 and Sprint had decided to build their own network anyway. Like I said, an interesting time it has been.

It is no secret that gaming hardware sales are down. Nintendo posted its first ever loss this quarter but, in large part, to lackluster hardware sales. They sold just under 10 million Wii consoles compared to 15 million this time last year; that is a 33% drop in hardware sales. The sales numbers on the 3DS are, at this point, legendary, and it is difficult to recover from.

A little over a year ago, AOL agreed to purchase The Huffington Post, which made Arianna Huffington the Editor-in-Chief of AOL media. This decision was controversial all over the Internet, but most famously through the TechCrunch space, who lost their founder, Mike Arrington, followed by an exodus of employees following behind him. Obviously the decision to make Huffington Czar of AOL has turned out well for the company, so long as their goal was to make all of their brands as irrelevant as AOL itself.

Google and the government have a very sketchy relationship. They recently received a $25,000 fine for the StreetView debacle, plus the impending anti-trust case, but that isn't their only current problem. They have also been under investigation over a violation of Internet privacy, overriding security settings on Apple's Safari web browser, and this fine won't be a slap on the wrist.

Since Netflix and Hulu started streaming content, both new and old, to your computer, Xbox, PlayStation, Wii and more, for a very low cost, the future of appointment television has been bleak. In fact, Piltch Point host and Online Editorial Director of LAPTOP Magazine, Avram Piltch listed it as one of the 15 modern technologies his son will never use. While those of us with computers know what is obviously coming, there are others who do not understand it.