An announcement that Google will buy Bellevue, Wash.-based company Valve "any second now," according to anonymous sources cited by the Inquirer. At the heart of the deal is Valve's content distribution platform, Steam. Valve is popularly known as the creator of the Half-Life and Counter Strike video game franchises, and built Steam to distribute the massive amounts of data and code to p, and has since become a platform for multiple game publishers. In other words, the company can reliably deliver DVD-sized files, such as content updates and software patches, to millions worldwide over the Internet — and Google fetishizes solutions to scaling problems. [The Inquirer]