Summary: News: Dell goes private in $24.4 billion deal, including $2 billion loan from Microsoft Dell has officially closed a buyout of the company, taking the company off the publicly-traded stock market and into private hands. The deal is being financed by cash and equity from CEO Michael Dell, funds from investment firms Silver Lake and MSD Capital, a $2 billion loan from Microsoft, plus debt financing from a number of banks as well as Dell's cash on hand. Dell's shareholders will receive $13.65 for each share of common Dell stock they hold, up about 25 percent from Dell's closing share price of $10.88 back on January 11th, which Dell says is the last day prior to rumors of the buying starting to circulate. Those rumors have escalated in the last week, when Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal reported that discussions to bring Dell private were serious, and that a deal could be reached in the following six weeks. Bloomberg also reports that board members met last night to vote on the move, while the Wall Street Journal cites top execs as saying company founder Michael Dell is a man "increasingly worried about his legacy." Michael Dell has reportedly lost enthusiasm for the day-to-day running of the company since reclaiming his position as CEO of the company in 2007. http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/5/3904452/dell-goes-private Note from us: At the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo97 here today, the CEO of competitor Dell Computer added his voice to the chorus when asked what could be done to fix the Mac maker. His solution was a drastic one. "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives. Google Glass will speak to you by vibrating the bones in your head Google Glass’ papers have arrived at the FCC, according to filings posted Thursday. The headset, likely the Explorer edition promised to developers at Google I/O last year, includes an 802.11 b/g 2.4 GHz WLAN, a low-energy Bluetooth 4.0 radio, and—if one sentence and a corresponding patent are to be believed—a “vibrating element” for transmitting sound to the user’s head via bone conduction. Google filed a patent for a headset that uses bone conduction audio, which was granted only a week ago. The audio would work similar to that of certain children’s toothbrushes: a vibration transducer vibrates the bones in the user’s head, which translate the vibration to the cochlea, the fluid-filled cavity inside the ear, which then reads the vibrations as sound. The technology is already used in many headphones, with the advantage that such sound can be clearer than it is from the tiny speakers that are in earbuds. In its FCC filing, Google makes only one mention of a “vibrating element” in the headsets, wherein a video stored within the headset plays and transmits audio via vibration. The video test was conducted as part of testing the Bluetooth Low Energy mode. Google has also indicated plans for user input to the headsets, including number pads projected onto surfaces and gesture interpretation from the headset’s camera. Google co-founder Sergey Brin stated shortly after the 2012 Google I/O that ideally the company would get the Glass headsets into developer hands “early” this year. Google has already held one developer conference this past week in San Francisco, and a second conference is currently in progress in New York. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/google-glass-will-speak-to-you-by-vibrating-the-bones-in-your-head/ iPhone 5, iPad mini jailbreak now available All iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and iPad mini models running iOS 6 can now be jailbroken thanks to the evasi0n tool It's taken around five months since the release of the iPhone 5, but the moment many of you have been waiting for has finally arrived: an untethered jailbreak for iOS 6.1 has been released. The tool, dubbed evasi0n, is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux,
