The UpStream

Earlier this week, the long-running show At the Movies was cancelled due to a number of reasons. In this day in age, we know that any twelve year-old with a laptop can become movie critic with the power of the Internet, and nobody reads reviews in the newspaper or on TV anymore. And although Roger Ebert had no problem accepting that the Internet exists, medical conditions caused him to leave the show in 2006 to be replaced by several different hosts. The good news is that Ebert seems like he's back on his feet and ready to give it another go - at least on the production side - because on his blog the other day he confirmed that he and his wife are collaborating to create a new movie review show. Even better is that he states it will have a strong presence online.

Everyone knows what it's like to wait in long lines at the mall, convenience store or the DMV. Thankfully, researchers from Suncheon National University located in Suncheon, South Korea along with Rice University in Houston Texas have been working hard to make long lines something for the history books. The RFID tags they are developing consist of 3 layers filled with a special semi-conductive ink that contains carbon nano-tubes. This is important because the transistors have to be semi-conducting to store information.

Currently, the tags can only store 1 byte of information but with this proof of concept they can add more transistors to achieve a 96 bit memory capacity which would be enough to store SKUs for all items sold in large grocery stores. The RFID tags cost 3 cents per package to print which is considerably less than silicon tags that are around 50 cents per package. They can also do things that silicon tags can't like store and provide information about product freshness and how long it has been on the shelf. Researchers predict that the cost of their RFIDs if printed directly on the package would fall to 1 cent per package.

There are two worlds in the gaming industry: the gaming developers who work themselves to the bone (most of the time) to put out great games for consumers to purchase... and GameStop. The former works to make a paycheck and the latter makes a paycheck off of the work of the developers by selling used games at outrageous prices and profit margins. So of course another lawsuit has been filed against GameStop, stating that game boxes read that content is included, when more than likely the code was used or simply not included when the game was traded in. Shocking.

Gamestop's return policy is for seven days, but apparently the plaintiffs feel this is not enough time to realize that something doesn't come with a game, and that employees of GameStop should inform their customers of these circumstances. Do we really think a company who relies on used game revenue as their bread-maker is going to disclose these things?

Here's what the suit says:

Not too many of us out there actually purchase a physical CD anymore, unless we're interested in the cover art that is. Since it is currently cheaper to just download the whole album from iTunes, what's the point of having the physical disk right? Well, Universal Music Group is hoping to change your mind, by lowering CD prices to a $10.00 maximum.

Beginning in April, almost all of the company's CD's will be cut to a price between $6.00 and $10.00. The drop in price hopes to have an increasing effect on sales. For all those devoted fans out there, UMG has stated that they plan to generate more "deluxe" editions then they currently have, but it'll cost you a little more.

While we wait for Valve to finally release the Engineer update for Team Fortress 2, Valve is letting anyone else add content to their hit multiplayer shooter. This week Valve released an update to the game that includes new weapons and items that were submitted by Team Fortress fans. Here's a little hint for the people out there wondering what's been added, have you noticed Elvis has been brought back from the dead to play some TF2? Well you can thank your fellow players for that little add-on.

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia recently visited EA to check in on the progress of the company's upcoming, cutscene-driven MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. He reported that "earnings are somewhat depressed" due to the development costs for the game, but EA management is hopeful that they'll recoup this cash when the title brings in over two million subscribers. He added that, at the very least, the game needs over one million players in order for EA to break even on its biggest development project to date. For you number junkies out there, your standard computer game these days cost around $50 just to buy the game. This means that SWTOR could potentially cost a petty 50 million dollars to develop.