Gawker: valleywag, craig mccaw

Street View finally coming to Seattle

Jackson West — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

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."

My question is whether or not the car will be passing through the enclaves of wealth on the east side of Lake Washington like Mercer Island and Medina, where Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has his four-story underground bunker. Still, the homes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Clearwire founder Craig McCaw are all within Seattle city limits, so happy Street View hunting! (Photos by Jed Rosenzweig)

How Google yanked AT&T's chain

WagCurious — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:00:00 EDT

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?

Bidding up the cost that AT&T and Verizon eventually paid for their own wireless spectrum in the FCC's 700-Mhz auction. Far from simply trying to implement "open access" via their bid, it appears now that Google was trying to increase the cost of networks that might compete with Clearwire's WiMax one. Which would now explain why AT&T spent $200,000 to get three Congressmen to profess their hatred for Google.

There is precedent for yanking AT&T's chain in such a grand manner. When AT&T first bid on wireless spectrum back in the '90s, after its acquisition of McCaw Cellular Communications, it found that during the auction all their key markets had been bid up by a mysterious third party. Though they finally won the licenses they so coveted, they paid far more than anyone had expected. Who was the mysterious bidder that cost them so much money? The same person that is expected to be named chairman of the Clearwire consortium: Craig McCaw.

(WagCurious, a Valleywag commenter, submitted this item.)

Sprint, Clearwire work seven-way deal to create new wireless-broadband startup worth $12 billion

Jackson West — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:20:00 EDT

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.