The UpStream

Back in July, Microsoft made a mistake and gave us an accidental look on their secret project, Socl.com, codenamed Tulalip. Their probably brilliant mistake has turned into a full project as this week the company announced the launch of So.cl (socl.com redirects you to so.cl), which is a hybrid of social media meets project sharing meets learning network. The difference between this and Google Wave is that Microsoft has an idea of what they want to do and we're they're going with this new site.

If you haven't heard by now, Xbox LIVE's new dashboard update was released last week. On the grand scale, the update was an overall pleasant one, however the lack of the new media partners at rollout of the update left a bitter taste in the mouths of the masses. To be fair, Major Nelson did report that we'd see the video and live TV content during the holiday season and not specifically with the dashboard update, but it would've made more sense for Microsoft to release it all at the same time.

At any rate, just a handful of days after the dashboard was refreshed, we now have more media partners signing on to LIVE. While we're still waiting on a couple, there's some nice additions waiting for your downloading pleasure. We dive into the details after the break.

The past few weeks have been a little uncertain for Clearwire. From their possible skip on a huge debt to losing 3 resellers, the industry was worried that it would lose a big player in the wireless game. Never fear, though, because Sprint is here to save the day. The company announced this week that there may be up to $1.6 billion in payments to Clearwire for their WiMax and future LTE services.

These modified agreements were made in what seems to be Clear's last hour of life, but was also put together to meet Sprint's growing 4G needs, as it gives Sprint unlimited access to the network.

It's been a while since OnLive has made headlines. We go back about a year ago, when we last spoke of OnLive and that they launched a microconsole for your gaming enjoyment. This week, OnLive has recognized the trend that people play games on smartphones and tablets. However, OnLive hasn't drank all of the GameStop Kool-Aid, and won't limit the way or what games you play on the mobile platform.

What happens when you work for the big Fruit company and you go rant on Facebook about your iPhone, apps and other things Apple? You get fired, of course. That's what happened to employee Samuel Crisp, one of Apple's beloved and adorned Geniuses. It turns out, even though his profile was set to private, one of his friends turned in his comments to Apple management. Apple termed the guy, stating that his comments violated the company's social media policy.

We've talked about firings over Facebook in the past. However, those were a little bit different. This employee's profile was private, as were the comments. Just because one of his friends/co-workers could only think the things Sam was man enough to post and decided to rat him out doesn't mean he should be canned.

This week, Samuel lost his appeal of the wrongful termination, so obviously the next thing that would happen would be that Apple's internal, private social media policy mysteriously was leaked online, and we have it after the break.

Until the defining question of "Will you Wii U," is answered after Nintendo's latest console, that was debuted this year at E3, hits store shelves it will be up to the 3DS and remnant Wii console sales to keep all the yen Nintendo is burning up in losses from creating a financial black hole from which even Mario can't escape.

You may remember back in August, the 3DS price was slashed from $249.99 to $169.99 after Nintendo revisited their 2010 sales forecast and re-evaluated at a 82% decrease which put Nintendo at $257 million for this year. Even for a company like them, a number that low needs no translation as to what it could mean if the 3DS sales don't start spin-dashing in the opposite direction. The good news there is that Satoru Iwata expects to make it rain 3DS's in Japan with 4 million units sold by March 2012 and he recently said that the device had regained it's momentum in an interview with the Nikkei Business Daily. The bad news is that everywhere else in the world that matters, sales were about the same as those for a mediocre Mario game.

This month Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo America, told Reuters that maintaining the momentum captured by the 3DS from Black Friday sales in the US was his main focus. From March through September, US sales had only made up 34% of all 3DS sales worldwide, just behind Europe at 37%. The major reason attributed to this is the slouching economy is both the US and Europe, but the Xbox 360 had record sales of 960,000 units for the week of Black Friday so that may not be entirely true. Lucky for them, Sony won't be getting their new PS Vita handheld on store shelves until February 22nd, 2012 but if things aren't really happening for the 3DS by then, the only hope Nintendo has of seeing gold coin showers again is if they manage to find some star power.