There is a thread on Reddit that said “Oops. What’s the most expensive mistake you’ve made at work? (Costs to your employer, or yourself).” The best answer to this thread was “I met both Carl Page and Larry Page at a party hosted by a Stanford friend of mine in 1998. Carl gave me his card for eGroups and said ‘we’re hiring’. Larry gave me his card for Google-a flimsy bit of paper obviously printed by bubble jet-and said ‘we’re hiring’. I said, ‘Nah, who needs another search engine?’ and went to graduate school.” [Reddit thread via BusinessInsider]

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY), AOL, Inc. (NYSE:AOL), Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX), Office Depot, Inc. (NYSE:ODP), Staples, Inc. (NASDAQ:SPLS), Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), and Facebook all got together to fight back against the lawsuit that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Paul Allen filed against them. Google led the response team by saying that the lawsuit does not back up its claims that they are violating approaches that were pioneered by Interval Research, a defunct incubator company that was financed by Allen.

Groupon is preparing to launch a self-serve deal platform service for merchants to offer coupons in real-time. “Groupon Stores is a place where your favorite, local businesses can sign up, create a storage page, and post deals at anytime for you to see. Welcome to the future of Groupon,” stated the company. Groupon Stores will allow you to “Follow” your favorite business and receive offers directly, thus resulting in direct competition to Facebook Pages and Twitter deal accounts. [Yipit]

Twitter may raise $200 million in additional funding according to Peter Kafka of AllThingsD. Twitter’s valuation based on their last round of funding was $1 billion. Twitter raised $100 million in its last round. No decisions have been made yet said the company. [AllThingsD]

I always thought it would be awesome if Netflix introduces a streaming-only plan. Especially because I tend to prefer to watch movies on the web instead of physically putting in a DVD in a computer or a DVD player. Plus streaming is INSTANT! Good news if you prefer streaming over DVDs. Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) is testing out a streaming-only plan for $7.99 or $8.99 in the U.S. right now. Engadget is reporting that if they open up Netflix using Google Chrome, they are being offered a deal to stream a collection of Netflix movies for $7.99 per month. And they tried with Firefox only to learn that the same offer is going for $8.99. If you wanted physical discs and a streaming option, it costs $9.99 per month. No word on when this will be officially rolled out to everyone and what the final price will be. [Engadget]

Geolocation check-in service Foursquare has added a badge for NASA. Expedition 25 commander Douglas H. Wheelock is the first human to use Foursquare from space. Doug check in from the International Space Station and had unlocked the NASA Explorer Badge on Foursquare. JESS3 and NASA have put together space-related places and made a badge available on Foursquare if you check in from theme. You can find the NASA Foursquare page here: http://www.foursquare.com/nasa. [Foursquare Blog]

Pirate Parties International had a meeting about where to store data… in the sky. Pirate Parties International does not have direct links to PiratPartiet, the Swedish political party that is linked to The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks — but the PPI still has to deal with their servers being seized. The PPI tried to store their servers in former British naval base Sealand at one point, but the deal fell through. The PPI discussed a potential airborne server hooked to a blimp or a weather balloon as a possibility. Crazy! Novel idea, but crazy. [Forbes via Gizmodo]

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) will allow Kindle owners to loan e-books to each other soon. In a note to readers, Amazon.com said “later this year, we will be introducing lending for Kindle, a new feature that lets you loan your Kindle books to other Kindle device or Kindle app users. Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period. Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable – this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.” [mediabistro]