leverage

Dell board said to be meeting tonight to vote on buyout deal

Rumors of a Dell buyout deal have been swirling for the past few weeks and now word is that Dell's board plans to vote tonight on whether to take the company private, according to Bloomberg.

The deal would offer Dell shares at $13.50 to $13.75 each, which totals around $24 billion, sources familiar with the negotiations told Bloomberg. The buyout could be announced as early as tomorrow morning.

Reportedly Microsoft, private equity firm Silver Lake Management, and company CEO Michael Dell will all contribute sizable investments in the deal. Michael Dell is expected to contribute $700 million, … Read more

Dell buyout deal could happen Monday -- Reuters

Dell may be close to a deal that would take the PC maker private, Reuters reported this morning.

Citing "two people familiar with the matter," the news service reported that the company could announce an agreement as early as Monday. Expectations are that Dell would be bought out by a group led by its CEO and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.

Later in the day, Reuters published a separate report, also citing two people familiar with the matter, saying that Michael Dell and partners were negotiating with the company at a price of $13 to $14 per … Read more

Dell eyeing buyout at $13 to $14 a share -- WSJ

Dell is reportedly looking to go private for a total asking price of $22 billion to $25 billion.

The company spoke with private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners about a leveraged buyout on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. Citing a "person familiar with the matter," the Journal wrote that the buyout group would include Silver Lake, Dell CEO Michael Dell, and at least one other investor, such as a pension fund or a sovereign wealth fund.

To meet an asking price of $13 to $14 a share, or $22 billion to $25 billion, Silver Lake and the … Read more

Cross-platform consistency, now with speed

As Adobe has focused on Flash Player development in the aftermath of the rise of HTML5, it hasn't ignored its other content-delivery system: Adobe AIR. AIR 3 brings some hefty speed improvements to the system, thanks to a little something new called Stage3D.

In case you're new to AIR, which means Adobe Integrated Runtime, it's a platform that runs applications across multiple systems without coding in more than one language. It's powerful and respected for giving people the same end-user experience, whether on Windows, Mac, or Linux. One very well-known AIR app is TweetDeck. If you … Read more

Cross-platform consistency, now with speed

In case you're new to AIR, which stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime, it's a platform that runs applications across multiple systems without coding in more than one language. It's powerful and respected for giving people the same end-user experience, whether on Windows, Mac, or Linux. One very well-known AIR app is TweetDeck. If … Read more

Use the tools that make the job easier

Google recently published data showing that the character encoding used on the Web is dramatically shifting towards the Unicode standard. It also discussed its strategy of up-leveling data it finds in dozens of competing character encodings into the Unicode standard, then processing everything in Unicode. This is a great example of the philosophy:

Use tools that make the job easy.

When you narrow the field to data formats and structures, you can make the rule a bit more specific:

Use data formats that are easy to process.Convert to and from those formats, if and as necessary.

And for good … Read more

Hard currency and open source

Over 150 years ago, President Andrew Jackson agitated for principles that will sound familiar to open-source software advocates. But his "back to our agrarian roots" rationale for doing so sounds as wrong-headed today as it did back then.

Jackson didn't write software, of course, but Jackson's rage against the "mysterious abstraction of commercial institutions" sounds right at home in the economic wreckage of the housing bubble, as well as the seething critiques of the waste and lock-in of proprietary software vendors made by open-source advocates, including myself. Jackson, as T.J. Stiles remarks in … Read more

Leverage: A bank (sort of) for your gift cards

On Monday, November 26, Leverage will open up its gift card management service. It will be the place for you to register all those plastic cash cards you get from people who want to give you a gift but don't want to give you a gift. The service will track all your cards and the balances you have on them, let you buy and swap cards, send offers your way from the retailers whose cards you're holding, and pay you interest on the unused balance on your cards--which is weird, when you think about it for half a … Read more