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The majority of top decision-makers at the Federal Trade Commission believe that an antitrust case should be brought against Google Inc, meaning the search giant could soon be headed into tough negotiations, three people familiar with the matter said.

Om Malik is in Amsterdam and stopped by Heineken. I’m so jealous.

Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos confirmed on Thursday that the online retailer sells its Kindle e-reader “at cost”, with profit coming instead from sales of online content.

That’s one way to do it I suppose. Or you could just design great products and make money on all of it.

NextGuide, my personal favorite TV Guide app (that I built at the company I run), is now updated to include Amazon Prime and Amazon Instant Video alongside live TV, Hulu Plus, iTunes, and Netflix. It’s really a great experience to browse all providers simultaneously and to search for shows and actually know where they are watchable.

Looks very interesting.

CNET:

To encourage repeat viewings of his latest flick, writer-director Rian Johnson released an audio commentary track that you can listen to on your iPod.The director of the sci-fi action movie “Looper” wants you to bring an iPod into the theater to listen to details of how each scene was filmed.In a Tumblr post, Johnson, who also directed the AMC TV show “Breaking Bad,” provides a downloadable MP3 file to be played during the movie.

This is a really interesting idea and I wonder if it will catch on. I’m a huge fan of commentary tracks on DVDs.

Huffington Post:

There are large phone bills and then there are insane phone bills. Solenne San Jose, a woman from Pessac, in the Bordeaux region of France, received an utterly insane one.After she terminated a contract with the phone company Bouygues Telecom early, San Jose was told that she would have to pay a cancellation fee. The bill she received was for a mind-blowing €11,721,000,000,000,000, the Herald Sun reported. That’s around $15 quadrillion.

The best line in the story is, “San Jose had a hard time convincing the phone company that was the case.” WHY!? How hard should it be for even a mindless bureaucrat to acknowledge that the bill might just be incorrect?

ThinkGeek:

A Candwich Canned Sandwich is one tasty DIY treat, just waiting for you to crack it open. When you pop the top of your Candwich Canned Sandwich, you’ll hear an audible hiss of magic, and out will spill the contents to make one yummy sandwich. And best of all, each Candwich Canned Sandwich has a 1 year shelf life…

I almost threw up just reading about this.

“Partysaurus Rex” is a new short film from Pixar shown in theaters before Finding Nemo 3D. Also online, thanks to Disney.

I like it. I’d never do it, but I like it.

I like this. Lennart Ziburski didn’t just do a shrunken iPhone, but a whole new concept.

The Guardian:

Scientists from Newcastle University have drawn up a table of the least pleasant sounds we may encounter as part of everyday life.They tested reactions to 74 different noises both in outward response and more closely via small changes in the brain.The results are published in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience and show, among other things, that acoustically anything in the frequency range of around 2,000 to 5,000 Hz was found to be unpleasant.

I’m not going to tell you what they are – you’ll have to click through to see for yourself. Then, you will be forced to listen to them out of curiosity. Then you will find yourself in pain – just like I was.

New York Times:

Zipping around on a motorcycle can be fun, but being in a downpour or an accident on one is not. Driving a car is safer and more comfortable, but traffic and parking can be annoying. What if you got rid of the bad parts of both?You might end up with something like the C-1, an electric motorcycle that looks as if it came out of the movie “Tron.”

As a rider myself, I have a hard time calling this thing a motorcycle but as a “single person urban transport vehicle”, it’s kind of interesting. Make sure you watch the video from the company to see how the fascinating gyroscopes work to keep the “rubber side down”. It will be interesting to see if this ever becomes a real shipping product.

The gadget maker has hired Jim Mergard, a 16-year veteran of Advanced Micro Devices who was a vice president and chief engineer there before he left for Samsung. He is known for playing a leading role in the development of a high-profile AMD chip that carried the code name Brazos and was designed for low-end portable computers.

“Exclusive” is a way to dupe readers into taking you seriously, into believing that yours is the only page upon which they can devour the freshest and the latest. But that’s a lie. It always has been.

Jonathan Poritsky take a look at the history of the word exclusive.

Just picked this up. I’ll have a review later on, but if it’s all that it’s supposed to be, this could be the ultimate delay for guitar players.

Kobo, maker of inexpensive e-readers, has acquired indie software developer Aquafadas, maker of digital publishing software.

Two new Slingbox models were released last night. I’ve never had one, but I want the 500 model.

Shawn Blanc in his review of the Hidden Radio, a project he backed on Kickstarter.

Taiwan is asking Apple Inc. to blur a map image of its new $1.4 billion early warning radar station that can detect aircraft and missiles coming from as far as western China.

So Maps is good then.

OnAir in-flight mobile service is considered international roaming, and is billed appropriately. (First, your carrier has to have a roaming agreement with OnAir.) This AT&T page suggests OnAir calls are billed at $3.49 per minute, for example. Text messages are $0.50 each.

That should cut down on the needless yammering.

Facebook Inc is testing a feature that lets users of the social network create “wishlists” of home furnishings, clothing and other retail products, laying the groundwork for what some believe could be an eventual push into e-commerce.

Makes sense since so many people are on Facebook.

Leave your laptop behind. Imagine having control over your computer from anywhere. Jump Desktop is a remote desktop application (RDP and VNC) that gets you to your computer from any iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac and Android device. With over 4000 reviews, customers have declared it a 5 star app. It is super easy to setup, with automatic configuration you will be up and running in less than 5 minutes.

It is the easiest, the fastest and most secure way to get to your computer.

Wired:

Watch as Oracle Team USA CEO Russell Coutts, a four-time America’s Cup winner, flips an AC45 in a practice race last summer. The AC45, named for its length, is 70 feet tall, 22.6 feet wide and weighs 3,086 pounds. Now consider that the boats racing in next year’s Cup finals are twice as big and have a top speed north of 30 knots.

The big cats are back on the Bay.

I’m not a fan of Larry Ellison but I think he deserves props for livening up the America’s Cup Series. As much as I loved the “old boats”, these new ones are like F1 race cars – hi-tech and dangerous. I’ve seen some of the racing on TV and the new “yachts” are amazing and the new rules are designed to make the racing a real live TV sporting event. I wish Ellison luck.

A metal singer got drunk and made a video with his cat, and this is the result.

Nice.