Dell's move to pay over $53 billion to buy EMC in the world's biggest-ever technology merger is coming to its last stages. 

Dell is expected to announce EMC's acceptance of a buyout offer by Monday or Tuesday, US-time. Dell is a global household name that manufactures PCs and servers. EMC on the other hand, is a lesser-known technology company that has focused on creating data storage, cloud computing and big data systems.

The combination of both would create a hardware and software titan. Analysts warned such mega-deals come with risks. "Large purchases like this often don't work out that well," said Kevin McIsaac, an IT infrastructure analyst with Intelligent Business Research Services.

Reuters reported that EMC's board had agreed to accept the deal with an offer of $US33 per share, citing sources close to the deal. Around $US25 per share would be paid in cash, and the rest would be paid to EMC shareholders with a special stock that tracks the market value of VMWare, the virtualisation software company majority-owned by EMC.

EMC is expected to have included a "go-shop" clause that would give it 60 days to find rival suitors in an effort to convince shareholders that Dell had offered the best deal.

Microsoft and Cisco are the most likely potential buyers but industry watchers have expressed doubts that either party will beat Dell's offer, which was 27 per cent more than EMC's share price before news leaked out last week.

The largest technology tie-up prior to this move involved the May merger of Broadcom and Avago, which was worth $US37 billion ($50.4 billion) and is yet to be completed.

If completed, the deal would be the second large buy-out by Michael Dell, one of the pioneers of the PC industry, in barely two years.

He bought out the PC company that bears his surname two years ago for $US25 billion to help undertake a drastic overhaul that he said would have been tough to complete if it had remained publicly-listed.

Taking Dell private also made it far simpler for the technology giant to acquire its rivals and would-be collaborators without running the risk of facing the wrath of major shareholders.

Mr Dell will be hoping that this advantage extends to the newly-merged entity, which will then have the firepower to restructure and reinvest in successful segments of its business without being scrutinised on the New York Stock Exchange.

Combining both companies also makes strategic sense. Where Dell has traditionally focussed on building IT servers, the hardware of data centres, EMC specialises in making the smarts that make the systems sing.

Its big data systems are designed to analyse vast tranches of information and find disparate patterns that corporate and government customers then use to improve products and policies.

This would allow Dell to be a one-stop shop for both the data centre systems that store the rapidly rising amounts of information produced by society and the software that turns it into productive sense.

But the deal also comes with tremendous risk because it creates a technology conglomerate in an era when many players, such as Google and Hewlett Packard, are splitting up their divisions to become more nimble.

The Financial Times also reported that Dell is in talks to raise over $US40 billion from an array of banks at a period of continuing uncertainty about the global economy.

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Facebook has finally unveiled its solution to people’s calls for a “dislike” button — in the form of six new emoji, each representing their own feeling.

Mark Zuckerberg hinted last month that his site was looking to expand the Like button, making a way for people to communicate that they were upset by news. And the site is now rolling out its solution in the form of emoji that represent “Love”, “Haha”, “Yay”, “Wow”, “Sad” and “Angry”.

Zuckerberg said for a long time that the feature wouldn’t be integrated in the “Dislike” button that many people had asked for, and that users wanted so much that it has spawned its own scams. Since that could be used for bullying and might make users feel bad, the site was exploring ways for people to communicate that they were upset without being explicitly negative.

Facebook’s way of doing that seems to be a series of expressive “Reactions”, rather than exactly replicating the Like button. That button is still available, but the new buttons sit alongside the regular thumbs up as extra options.

As with the Like button, the reactions will appear on any post in the news feed on mobile or desktop. The number of reactions that any post has received will sit underneath the post and users will be able to see who reacted and how.

The site will start rolling out the feature in Spain and Ireland, as a test. The countries have been chosen because they’re relatively closed groups and including Spain will allow the site to try out how the emoji work for non-English users, according to Techcrunch. 

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What did you just read?

It’s Google’s new purchased domain.

Now that Google is Alphabet, it's going to need some extra URLs to match its new identity.

But the company may be taking the quest for the perfect domain name a bit too far.

In addition to the ABC.xyz domain that Google showed off in August, it seems that it also recently acquired the domain for the entire alphabet.

That's right. Google is now the proud owner of the handy internet domain abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com.

Google's new 26-letter URL was spotted in Whois records by DomainInvesting.com. The site noted that the URL was created in 1999 and was privately owned before being transferred to Google, though it's not clear how much Google paid for the URL.

"We realized we missed a few letters in abc.xyz, so we're just being thorough," a Google representative told us in an emailed statement.

Recode's Mark Bergen speculates that the purchase may have been defensive, to prevent the likes of Apple or Facebook getting their hands on it.

Clicking on the URL today leads to an inactive site, and we wouldn't expect that to change anytime soon. The internet address may be easy to remember, but it's not one that most people would relish typing.

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Microsoft stunned the world by launching its first ever laptop, the Microsoft Surface Book.

Over the past few years, Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) has said that its Surface tablets would replace traditional laptops, but now the company has a backup product -- just in case.

The Microsoft Surface Book looks like a MacBook at first glance, but how it works is much more interesting -- and intuitive.

Just like the Surface, the new Surface Book can be used as a full-powered laptop or as a tablet. You can also snap the display screen to the back of the keyboard so it acts like a clipboard, thanks to a unique mechanical hinge.

The Microsoft Surface Book has a special hinge that allows the screen to be undocked, or connected backwards as a clipboard. But the Surface Book isn't just another Surface tablet with a better keyboard.

The monitor contains the latest Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, and the keyboard base has a graphics processing unit (GPU) that boosts the laptop's performance. In addition, about three-fourths of the device's battery life is stored in the keyboard.

The keyboard base enhances the laptop's performance. The Surface Book is noticeably sturdy. The tablet portion of the laptop weighs 1.6 pounds, and the whole unit weighs about 3.5 pounds.

The 13.5-inch Surface Book will go on sale on October 26, with pre-orders starting Tuesday. A base model will cost $1,499. The Surface Book was just one of several Windows 10 products announced on Tuesday. Microsoft also launched a new Surface Pro and two Lumia smartphones.

The new Microsoft Surface Pro 4 has a bigger display -- 12.3 inches -- but is the same size as the Surface Pro 3. Microsoft also updated the accompanying keyboard to include a fingerprint reader, larger touchpad and a better keyboard.

The stylus also got an upgrade: It has a one-year battery life, magnetically attaches to the Pro 4 (and Surface Book), works with different pen tips and has a digital eraser on the other end.

The Lumia 950 and 950XL are basically like pocket-sized Windows 10 computers now: You can connect your phone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Microsoft's goal is to "reinvent" products and "move people from needing Windows, to choosing Windows, to loving Windows," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. 

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