Kirkland 4G broadband provider Clearwire announced more executive changes today, including the addition of new strategy and marketing bosses.

David Maquera, former senior VP at Cricket Communications/Leap Wireless, is SVP and chief strategy officer reporting to CEO Bill Morrow.

Clearwire also hired Thomas Enraght-Moony, a former AT&T Wireless exec and Match.com CEO, as SVP and general manager of Clear Online, heading marketing, advertising and online sales and "customer management."

"David and Thomas bring a record of leadership and depth of experience that further enhance one of the most experienced leadership teams in the mobile industry," Morrow said in the release. "They bring fresh perspectives and insights that will be beneficial to our customers, partners and shareholders. I'm confident that their business acumen and vision will help Clearwire capitalize on the incredible opportunities ahead of us."

Chief Marketing Officer Atish Gude, a Sprint and Nextel veteran, "is leaving Clearwire to pursue new opportunities," the release said.

A social network for mothers wanting to learn more about new technology and online safety is coming together offline Friday, when Wired Moms holds its first conference in Redmond at Microsoft's campus.

The group led by Spokane mother Mary Heston, has more than 12,000 Twitter followers, a Facebook group and a Web site where topics such as cyberbullies and social networking are explained and discussed.

Friday's conference is pretty much sold out with more than 150 moms registered. but the group may have another one next year.

Bellevue-based T-Mobile USA today blamed a "software error" for a network outage that affected voice and messaging services for about 5 percent of its customers - including many in Seattle - on Tuesday.

"After investigating the cause, we have determined that a backend system software error had generated abnormal congestion on the network. T-Mobile has since implemented additional measures to help prevent this from happening in the future. We again apologize to those customers who were affected and may have been inconvenienced."

No word yet on whether customers will get a one-day break on their Tmo bills.

Microsoft exceeded the forecast it gave Wall Street - for layoffs.

The company announced today that it cut an additional 800 jobs as part of broad cutbacks announced in January. The initial target was to cut 5,000 jobs but with the round announced today, the total is 5,800, spokesman Lou Gellos said.

"This does complete that program," he said.

But Gellos didn't rule out additional cuts ahead as the company continually adjusts its business.

"If that means we focus on different businesses or take care of employee headcount issues, we would do that," he said.

It's a new tone for a company that historically was loathe to ever use the word layoff, but new executives and economic conditions have made efficiencies and cost-cutting a more public mantra at the world's largest software company.

Employees had heard rumors of cuts coming this week and the axe finally fell.

Gellos wouldn't say which areas are being cut or whether they correlate to Microsoft's recent decisions to terminate businesses such as the MSN Direct information service. The company also recently finished new versions of its biggest products - Windows 7 and a new version of Office that's in testing.

Nor could Gellos say exactly how the cuts have affected headcount, because the company has continued to hire "in certain focus areas." Some people whose jobs were cut found work in those focus areas, he said.

The company employed 91,005 globally and 40,244 in the Puget Sound region at the end of September, the most recent count available.

Today's move largely ends the first major layoffs in Microsoft's history. The cuts came in three waves, beginning in January and then another round in May, when Chief Executive Steve Ballmer reiterated the reasons in a memo to employees. An excerpt:

In January, in response to the global economic downturn, I announced our plan to adjust the company's cost structure through spending reductions and job eliminations. Today, we are implementing the second phase of this plan.

This is difficult news to share. Because our success at Microsoft has always been the direct result of the talent, hard work, and commitment of our people, eliminating positions is hard.

Today's action includes positions in the United States and in a number of countries around the world. In the U.S., affected employees will be notified directly by their managers today. In other countries, local leadership teams will provide more specific information about the impact to their organizations.

With this announcement, we are mostly but not all done with the planned 5,000 job eliminations by June 2010. We are moving quickly to reach this target in response to consistent feedback from our people and business groups that it's important to make decisions and reduce uncertainty for employees as quickly as possible, and so that organizations can concentrate their efforts and resources on strategic objectives.

As we move forward, we will continue to closely monitor the impact of the economic downturn on the company and if necessary, take further actions on our cost structure including additional job eliminations.

Gellos said there will be no such memo and no town hall-type meeting today.

Although the cuts are dramatic and ripple throughout the economy of a region shaken by Boeing's decision to begin building jetliners in South Carolina, Microsoft still hasn't retreated much from a massive hiring surge that began in 2007.

It hired nearly 13,000 people during its 2007 fiscal year, the biggest gain in a decade of surging employment growth at the company. That growth finally slowed this past year, during its fiscal year that ended June 30.

During that same period, the company in 2003 cut the stock option program that minted Microsoft millionaires and transformed the Seattle area during the 1990s, while ramping up its physical presence with an enormous, $1 billion-plus campus expansion that began in 2006.

Portions of the campus project were suspended when the cutbacks began, but the company continued to spend heavily on datacenters around the world to improve its search business and compete with Google and others developing online software and services.

Here's the company's total employment at the end of its last 10 fiscal years, plus net revenue:

June 30, 2009 92,736 $58.44B
June 30, 2008 91,259 $60.42B
June 30, 2007 78,565 $51.12B
June 30, 2006 71,172 $44.28B
June 30, 2005 61,000 $39.79B
June 30, 2004 57,086 $36.84B
June 30, 2003 54,468 $32.19B
June 30, 2002 50,621 $28.37B
June 30, 2001 48,030 $25.30B
June 30, 2000 39,170 $22.96B
June 30, 1999 31,575 $19.75B

Mercer Island billionaire Paul Allen is asking for federal bankruptcy protection as he liquidates the remains of Digeo, a Kirkland set-top box company that was mostly sold off this fall.

Allen filed for Chapter 11 protection Monday for a holding company that encompasses the remains of Digeo. It has assets of less than $50,000 and debts of $10 million to $50 million, according to the filing.

Among the nine unsecured creditors include Comcast - owed $632.42 - and Datec Inc., a Tukwila IT vendor owed $48,206.27.

A spokesman for Allen said the filing does not indicate the Microsoft co-founder is in financial straits and unable to pay the debts of his startup.

"No, not at all, it's not about Paul's personal wealth,'' said David Postman, spokesman for Allen's investment company, Vulcan.

"That is the prudent forum for winding down a remaining business," Postman said. "That's not unusual and it's the method to do that, to take the last piece of this company and liquidate."

Allen sold Digeo's key assets - including its brands and technology for its "Moxi" advanced set-top box systems - in September to Arris, a Suwanee, Ga.-based company that's a major player in the cable hardware business.

Arris paid $20 million for the assets. Allen had invested more than $110 million in Digeo since it was started in 1999.

Digeo had reorganized several times before Allen, his sister and others on the Digeo board decided last spring that it was time to sell or find a strategic partner for the company.

That was around the time Allen's biggest investment, St Louis-based cable company Charter Communications, filed for bankruptcy with $21.7 billion in debt.

The University of Washington and the X Prize Foundation announced a new partnership that will have grad students, faculty and others develop ideas for new X Prizes.

The Playa Vista, Calif.-based nonprofit gave its first award -- for $10 million -- in 2004 for a reusable spaceship backed by Paul Allen and designed by Burt Rutan.

Future competitions may be dreamed up at the new X Prize Labs@UW in the Evans School of Public Affairs, where "graduate students aided by faculty members and community stakeholders will research the prize philanthropy model, producing ideas and criteria for judging new X Prizes in space and ocean exploration, life sciences, energy and the environment, education and global development," the release said.

It's the second X Prize Labs, following another at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The UW lab will "tap into Evans School strengths in interdisciplinary public policy as well as regional strengths in science, technology and business management," Dean Sandra Archibald said in the release.

Foundation spokesman Michael Timmons said in the release that it wants to "create innovative ways for students to approach problems and the Evans School is the perfect place to do it. We believe that in the X Prize laboratory, UW students will extend the idea of incentivized problem solving."

UW alum Nelson Del Rio, a Los Angeles developer and investor, connected the school and the foundation.

The first lab will begin in January and last for a quarter, after which students will present their ideas to the foundation leaders and trustees.

Today's column is a preview of the big-thoughts college tour Microsoft's Craig Mundie's starting this week:

While most people were turning their clocks backward over the weekend, Microsoft research chief Craig Mundie was moving his forward, five to 10 years into the future.

CNET's Ina Fried has the deep dish on Microsoft's new Chicago datacenter, which may be the world's largest.

Key features include a modular design with servers clustered in shipping containers:

"Each of the shipping containers in the Chicago data center houses anywhere from 1,800 to 2,500 servers, each of which can be serving up e-mail, managing instant messages, or running applications for Microsoft's soon-to-be-launched cloud-based operating system--Windows Azure.

Upstairs, Microsoft has four traditional raised floor server rooms, each roughly 12,000 square feet and consuming, on average, 3 megawatts of power. It's all part of a data center that will eventually occupy 700,000 square feet, making it one of the world's largest."

Here's her video: