The UpStream

On Friday Microsoft finally released the price for the Windows 7 Family Pack. With the Family Pack, users will be permitted to upgrade to the Home Premium edition on up to three PCs. The Family Pack was unintentionally announced previously on the Internet, but a price was never made public. At only $149, the Windows 7 Family Pack is very economical for users upgrading from XP or Vista.

The latest report by Sony stated that sales of the Sony PS3 continue to decline worldwide. In the last quarter, ending June 30, Sony suffered an astounding loss of $390.5 million dollars. Thanks to Angels&Demons, Sony's sales did improve in the motion picture division 6.5%, but this did not make up for great losses in every other department. As compared to last year, Sony's sales in both gaming and computers have declined 37.4%, according to an article in The New York Times.

Over the past several years it has sure been exciting to see the web continuously evolve. Today, the applications are endless and continue to grow while competition is soaring at an all time high. It seems that Google, Microsoft, Firefox, Apple etc. all want to be the "go to guys" for your Internet experience. Friday, July 31st Firefox broke 1,000,000,000 downloads. This figure also includes updates that were purposely downloaded as well but don't let the numbers fool you.

This does not mean that 1 billion people use Firefox; that statistic means something else entirely. As it stands it's estimated that 300,000,000 actually do use Firefox which should be applauded as it continues to cut into Internet Explorers monstrous share of the market and sits at the #2 spot in front of Safari, Chrome, Opera and others. Currently IE8 has surpassed 200,000,000 downloads and that has been over the 4 months since its release. The 1 billion downloads for Firefox go back to Version 1.0 almost 5 years ago. To keep up with Firefox you can visit www.onebillionplusyou.com.

More exclusivity battles are coming out of the telecom compounds, this time, from AT&T and Apple. Six weeks ago, Google developed and submitted a Google Voice application for the iPhone, which was rejected and remove from the iPhone application store recently. The FCC has contacted both AT&T and Apple, informally requesting their motives behind the matter. The issue is coming off of the heels of a new administration's tighter scrutiny on the telecom and manufacturing sectors of this tech industry.

The FCC is on "a mission to foster a competitive wireless marketplace, protect and empower consumers, and promote innovation and investment," Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement about the matter at hand. "Recent news reports raise questions about practices in the mobile marketplace."

This is not the first of the letters that have been sent. Advocates and smaller carriers have caused the FCC to also look into the overall competitiveness of cell phone makers and carriers, as well as pricing and exclusivity of certain devices.

If you have been keeping up with the show or any other news source recently, then you are probably aware of the agro AT&T is building with some customers and especially 4chan (www.4chan.org) users due to the recent block their broadband internet services has placed on the site. It is not surprising that angry forum trolls and internet non-censorship activists would try to dish out some retribution.

On July 26th CNN's iReport citizen journalism site had a story posted about Randall Stephenson, the standing CEO of AT&T. The article went on to say that Stephenson was "found dead in his multi-million dollar beach-front mansion after a coke binge with male dancers everywhere." While I find this amusing, the story was reported falsely and was taken down quickly. The real question here is why did AT&T block them in the first place? You can read their explanation below as stated from Business Insider.

Google has sold its 5% stake in AOL back to Time Warner for $283 million. That is a lot of money for 5% of a company that is in the toilet. But now the bad news: they spent $1 billion to acquire the same 5% in 2005. Eep.

Obviously, this could be a huge business fail on Google's part, spending that kind of money on a company we all knew was going to die, but it could have also been a huge strategic move, adding themselves into the software and integrating to a point that AOL search will forever be powered by Google, no matter their financial stake. That extends their visibility to the 8 people who still use AOL for something other that AIM.

Weigh in: epic fail or strategic plan?