You can all Xohm now — and call it Clearwire. The much talked about WiMAX joint venture between Clearwire and Sprint Nextel is going to happen and the news is going to come as soon as tomorrow. The combined company is going to be worth $12 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. Here are some facts:

• Comcast is pumping in $1.05 billion.
• Intel Corp. is putting in $1 billion.
• $550 million will come from Time Warner Cable.
• $500 million will come from Google.
• $100 million will come from Bright House Networks.
• The new company is also going to be called Clearwire.
• Current Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff will also be the CEO of the new company, Craig McCaw will be chairman.
• The service will offer voice service and broadband.
• Cable providers will sell it under their own brand, with a re-seller agreement with the new Clearwire.
• There is a good chance this service comes out before the wireless guys roll out their LTE networks.

Other details are sketchy, but here are my thoughts:

• Sprint Xohm is dead.
• Craig McCaw can chalk this up another win — he saved his near-disaster investment(s) in Clearwire with this deal.
• Intel will throw mad money to save some of its investments, however foolish they might be.
• McCaw & Wolff bluffed their way to a sweetheart deal. The cable companies, Google and Sprint are all playing from a position of fear. McCaw made AT&T buy his wireless operation, spend billions on it and then walked away, smelling very green. Same is true this time.
• Many might see this as a win for Dan Hesse; I think of it as the start of one giant hack job in Overland Park, Kan. He will sell Nextel and be left with a puny Sprint that will eventually be sold to T-Mobile or someone willing to pay up just to shut up Wall Street.
• You might want to recall the AT&T implosion and the end of Michael Armstrong, who had the right ideas at the wrong time. Of course, he listened to Wall Street too much.
• The big winners will be the equipment providers: Motorola, Nortel, etc.

The elephant in the room:

This is a spaghetti-like mess of conflicts and self-interests. I wonder how open this network is going to be? Clearwire has a history of blocking other services such as VoIP carriers. Comcast is a known P2P offender. Will Google be our only search option?

The final word:

I told you so comes to mind :-)

Updated, Monday, 7.30 PST: Personalized web page startup Pageflakes has run into trouble and is desperately seeking a buyer, according to our sources. The company is rumored to be running low on cash and will join the dot.gone club unless it can find last-minute buyers. I am told that there are a couple of interested buyers, though they are not big spenders.

Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen, formerly of Yahoo, denied that the company was running out of cash. He invited me to a fancy lunch and offered to pay with the company company card. “All startups are up for sale! We frequently receive inbound M&A inquiries,” he said.

However, my sources are fairly confident about the tough times facing the company, which was founded in Germany and is headquartered in San Francisco.

The company was co-founded in October 2005 by Christoph Janz, Omar AL Zabir, Ole Braundenburg and Shahedul Huq Khandkar. Benchmark Capital Europe invested $1.3 million in Pageflakes in May 2006, and followed up with a $2.8 million bridge.

Even though Cohen denies running out of cash, our sources tell us that their burn rate is over $300,000. Given that the company had little to show in terms of revenues for 2007, simple math shows that they are skating on very thin ice. Simply put, they’re in urgent need of fresh cash, but given the state of their traffic, that looks like a long shot. Pageflakes had around 1.5 million visitors a month and over 200,000 registered users. Those are remarkably low numbers, making it tougher for them to compete with their rivals, which explains why Pageflakes’ recent attempts to raise capital have come to naught.

Pageflakes’ closest rival is Netvibes, a Paris-based company that has had its own set of challenges. Of course, the real competitors for these personalized web page startups are the Internet gorillas – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL – which are offering their own version of personalized web pages. (Read: WebWorkerDaily’s review of Top Ajax Start Pages.)

Pageflakes is just the tip of the iceberg: Many 2005-2006 consumer web startups that have failed to grow real-big-real-fast will find life increasingly tough, with many facing the fate of Pageflakes. Stay tuned!

Updated: Last evening we got an email from Cohen in response to our questions. Here is essentially what he said.

We don’t give out financials, but the liabilities we have are typical for a startup, we always make payroll, and we’re mostly current with our vendors. I won’t comment on the amount you state other than to say that’s it’s not too bad for a VC-funded startup! We’re out raising capital, and as you know the market is tough, and we haven’t closed a new round. Our current VC continues to be supportive.

This morning, there are reports that Live Universe is buying them. Given that Brad Greenspan’s roll-up vehicle buys web companies on the cheap, it is clear Pageflakes didn’t get a premium. Newsgator was another bidder and offered close to half a million dollars. Since Live Universe hasn’t issued a statement, plain math showed Pageflakes was going to be part of the dot-gone club.