YouTube's 15 Minutes of Fame - 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!

Josh has come from the Brazilian wilds to bring yet another perspective on the gaming industry as well as today's up-and-coming technology. You may have seen him at GameStop over the past two years, or if you're a lover of Largo High School Productions, you have seen him up on stage doing his thing the last 4 years. On occasion, you can catch him on Xbox Live mowing down zombies in Left 4 Dead or making it rain on Madden 2010.

For those of you who played the second Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords you may remember a little moon known as Nar Shaddaa. One of the most vibrant and dangerous places in the galaxy, the place is a sprawling cityscape where nothing comes without a price. Dominated by a black market that caters to every indulgence, the moon has become the ultimate symbol of corruption. The upper levels present an endless parade of glittering neon towers and floating pleasure palaces; no greater concentration of wealth exists across the galaxy.

The University of Central Florida is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a rather interesting and strange project. $434,000 to be exact, to create a video game about real life situations with full-size avatars. The purpose? To teach pre-teen girls how to resist peer pressure when it comes to sex.

Want to hear the best termination story you'll ever hear? Well, here we go. Richard "Lord British" Garriott, Ultima creator and coiner of the term Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game created a company called Destination Games. They partnered with NCSoft to release a number of things, most notably Tabula Rasa, a semi-failure of an MMO. At some point, NCSoft bought the company and Garriott was made CEO of NCsoft Austin, also known as NC Interactive.

The mobile landscape is changing and we owe a lot of that change to mobile apps, or more realistically, the advertisement of mobile apps. These applications have been in existence for decades, but no one has made a big deal about them until Apple, who infamously advertised just that aspect of their products for a long time.

Sprint's marketing and product development teams have been clever and just plain awesome when it comes to the ways they have been able to combat the ever popular iPod, iPad and iPhone. We have all seen the commercials and ads that show the iPad connecting to the network via Sprint's mobile hotspot solution, and even went as far as to offer a free iPad case that had a pocket to fit the 4G/3G Overdrive. Well, now Sprint has teamed up with manufacturer ZTE to bring you the Peel, which is a case that will allow the iPod touch to do the same for Sprint's 3G network.

Citing increased real-life criminal activity originating in the online space, the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communication has placed a number of tight restrictions on massively multiplayer titles. These include bans on any and all advertisements for online games, as well as regulations forcing ISPs to shut off service to gaming cafes and retailers after hours.

Before this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, there had been rumors of a reboot of GoldenEye 007 and Nintendo put to bed speculation on whether it would be reviving the series, announcing that a reimaginging of Rare's Nintendo 64 classic would arrive for the Wii this November. However, Activision won't be limiting the game to just Nintendo's console.

Last week, we talked about how Google Me would be a way for Google to take on Facebook, at least on the social media side of things. But what about for the gaming market? With online games such as FrontierVille and FarmVille taking over, Google would have had to have seen the success, and this week, it looks like they have taken notice, as Google is trying to sweet talk social-gaming giant Zynga into doing business with them.

YouTube's 10 minute limit on videos has expanded to 15 minutes this week, giving users 50 percent more time to upload more pointless and random crap to clog the Internet's series of tubes. The new limit is a reflection of audiences' growing demand for longer form content online. In the past, YouTube content partners have been able to publish longer videos, but the ability for regular user to do this now is pretty significant.

The country's top-rated program for somewhere near 100 years now is on the brink of collapse. Simon Cowell has left the show so he can go back to having a career and recently rehired executive producer, Nigel Lythgoe, has fired Ellen Degenres and Kara DioGuardi, leaving the series with Randy Jackson.

While Marvel news was all over Comic-Con this week, one of the things that got swept under the rug was the announcement that Marvel Studios has regained rights to the Punisher franchise from Lionsgate. While this might seem like a small victory, let me tell you why it is no small matter.