Dell in $24 Billion Deal to Go Private  —  Dell announced Tuesday that it had agreed to go private in a $24 billion deal led by its founder and the investment firm Silver Lake, in the biggest leveraged buyout since the financial crisis.  —  Under the terms of the deal, the buyers' consortium …

Growing Numbers of Start-Ups Are Worth a Billion Dollars  —  SAN FRANCISCO — The number of privately held Silicon Valley start-ups that are worth more than $1 billion shocks even the executives running those companies.  —  “I thought we were special,” said Phil Libin, chief executive of Evernote …

Amazon launches new ‘Coins’ virtual currency for Kindle Fire app purchases, coming to the US in May  —  Intent on helping app developers gain more money from their Appstore submissions, Amazon today announced the launch of ‘Amazon Coins,’ a new virtual currency that will allow Kindle Fire owners …

Twitter Makes Big Acquisition, Buys Social TV Analytics Company Bluefin Labs  —  Twitter has acquired Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics company that was founded in 2008, sources say.  Although we don't know the exact acquisition price, we were told this is Twitter's biggest acquisition to date.

Facebook Is Said to Create Mobile Location-Tracking App  —  Facebook Inc. (FB) is developing a smartphone application that will track the location of users, two people with knowledge of the matter said, bolstering efforts to benefit from growing use of social media on mobile computers.

‘Radio Buy Buttons’ found in iOS 6.1 via newly jailbroken iPads, could mean new functionality coming  —  ‘Radio Buy’ buttons, above, enlarged, put together from files, below  —  Having a look around our newly jailbroken iPads with iFunBox, we happened on a new set of files in the iPad Music.app.

Ouya console will be sold at Best Buy, Target, and Gamestop for $99.99 in June  —  Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman has announced the first details of retail availability for the Android-powered games console.  If you missed out on Ouya's successful Kickstarter campaign and wanted to pick one up in stores …

The Threat of Silence  —  Meet the groundbreaking new encryption app set to revolutionize privacy and freak out the feds.  —  For the past few months, some of the world's leading cryptographers have been keeping a closely guarded secret about a pioneering new invention.  Today, they've decided it's time to tell all.

About.me Buys Itself Back from AOL  —  Here's your next challenge as a founder of a start-up: Sell your company to a digital behemoth for tens of millions of dollars, then buy it back for a fraction of the cost.  Oh, and keep the change.  —  On Monday, About.me, an online identity Web site …

HTC M7 to ditch megapixels in favour of Ultrapixels  —  HTC is to use a new camera sensor on its much-rumoured HTC M7?smartphone, Pocket-lint can confirm, which will use what the company calls Ultrapixels.  —  Although rumours have suggested the new smartphone will use a 13-megapixel sensor …

Jawbone buys Visere & MassiveHealth to marry data & design with wearable computing  —  Updated: You can tell the influence of uber designer (and chief creative officer) Yves Behar on the San Francisco-based wearable computing products company Jawbone.  The company is buying two startups …

128GB Retina iPads hit the Apple Store with 1-5 day ship times.  $799 for Wifi and $929 for LTE  —  As expected, Apple today added the 128GB iPad to the Apple Store and initiated a 1-3 business day shipping time on these high end tablets.  The Wifi models come in at a hefty $799 while the LTE models will be $929.

Evolution of a Founder: Lessons I have learned  —  Being a startup founder is hard, tough, frustrating and rewarding - possibly all within the space of a nanosecond.  And yet, it is like a high none other.  I have experienced it in others.  And quietly, I have lived it for over six years.

Report: Qihoo's iOS Apps Under Special Investigation by Apple  —  Still banned by Apple: the 360 Browser HD for iPad.  —  At the start of last week, all the 20+ iOS apps made by Chinese software company and search engine Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU) vanished from Apple's App Store - and they still haven't been restored.

How Monoprice Is Eating The Tech World From The Inside Out  —  An empire built on cheap HDMI cables stretches its reach.  Monoprice is angling to be the next huge electronics brand.  —  Five years ago, Monoprice was associated with two things: HDMI cables and nerds.

BlackBerry gets help from Trend Micro in the fight against malware  —  In the race to the starting line, BlackBerry pulled out all the stops in order to deliver an app library that's 70,000 strong, but now the firm's looking to Trend Micro in an effort to keep malicious software at bay.

Huawei launches Windows phone in Africa  —  The customised Huawei Windows phone will only be available in Africa  —  Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has unveiled a bespoke Windows-run smartphone exclusively available in Africa.  —  The customised device is being launched today in partnership …

Lenovo ThinkPad Helix delayed until March or April  —  Lenovo's versatile ThinkPad Helix was one of the more impressive convertible laptops we saw at CES 2013, but there's some bad news for those holding out for its mooted February release date.  Responding to a question on the company's Facebook page …

Hailo closes $30.6m Series B round from Union Square Ventures, Richard Branson, KDDI and others  —  Hailo has scooped a whopping $30.6m Series B funding round led by Union Square Ventures (USV), with participation from a slew of high-profile investors including Richard Branson and Japanese telco KDDI.

Brazil: The Social Media Capital of the Universe  —  SÃO PAULO—When Barbosa family members botched their cover of an old Brazilian gospel song last year on a family video, they thought it was pretty funny—funny enough to upload to YouTube.  —  But they didn't expect the rest of Brazil to laugh along with them.

Piston Cloud raises $8M — from Cisco and others — to push enterprise OpenStack  —  Piston Cloud has raised $8 million in new funding to fuel its push its enterprise-focused OpenStack offerings.  The series B round for Piston (see disclosure) includes money from new investors Cisco Systems, Data Collective and Swisscom Ventures.