The Google Street View car was Spotted in Microsoft Country last week after launching in many smaller markets around the country first. Apparently the drivers, rather than use some fancy, newfangled Internet doohickey, simply burn the data captured by the rooftop camera array onto a CD and mail it back to Mountain View. The fact that Portland, Oregon and Juneau, Alaska were added to the list of Street View cities before Seattle inspired an April Fools article in local publication Naked Loon quoting a fictional Google spokesmonkey as saying the addition of Seattle was "extremely unlikely, save for some kind of highly localized disaster centered somewhere in Redmond."

Negotiations to reform Clearwire, Craig McCaw's wireless-broadband startup, as a consortium backed by Google, Sprint, Comcast and others began as far back as January of this year. By mid-March the consortium had an outline of a deal that made Google the preferred software developer on the WiMax network. Today the consortium, operating under the Clearwire name, is expected to disclose that they are investing $3.2 billion in a nationwide WiMax network, which will eventually be able to deliver a 5-Mbps connection to cellphones and laptops. But what else was Google doing back in January?

Clearwire, the wireless data company started by Seattle-area cell-phone billionaire Craig McCaw, will be recontsituted as a new company valued at $12 billion backed by primarily by Sprint, but also by cable providers Time Warner, Comcast and Bright House, chipmaker Intel and Web search behemoth Google. McCaw will continue as chairman of the board at Clearwire and Ben Wolff as CEO. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse agreed to give control to the pair as part of the deal, to ease concerns that Sprint's core wireless business would conflict as the new company's services began to compete for voice and data customers. Sprint has encountered numerous problems with deploying Intel-developed WiMax, and there's still the issue of whether the company will sell Nextel after a $35 billion acquisition in 2005 went south.