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A Dell special committee has rejected a new proposal from a key shareholder Carl C. Icahn, and said it will continue to support the proposal by founder Michael Dell and private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners to take the company private.

Icahn's proposal in its present state is not a transaction that the committee could endorse and execute as "there is neither financing, nor any commitment from any party to participate, nor any remedy for the company and its shareholders if the transaction is not consummated," the special committee of the board said in a statement Tuesday. The committee was set up in August 2012 after the plans for taking the company private were revealed.

The proposal from Icahn does not adequately address the liquidity issues and other risks that were previously highlighted by the committee, it said.

Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners made an offer for Dell in February that aims to take the computers and services company private in a US$24.4 billion deal. The proposal offers to pay $13.65 per share in cash.

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An email composed, but never sent, by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs may prove instrumental in the Justice Department's case that Apple, along with the five largest book publishers, colluded to fix prices for electronic books.

In a draft email intended for Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue about negotiations with one publisher, Jobs

Your current smartphone’s processor may be fast, but Qualcomm is hoping to show you a whole new definition of mobile performance. On Tuesday, the company staged a benchmarking exhibition in San Francisco to demonstrate the raw speed of its Snapdragon 800 chip, designated for “premium” smartphone deployment later this year.

Qualcomm already has a footprint in many of the top handsets. The 400 series of chips is included in both the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4, for example. Qualcomm hasn’t announced which phones and tablets will use the 800 series, but, for what it’s worth, the company showed off the new chip using the 700MHz LTE band that’s specific to AT&T—although that means little at this point.

When Qualcomm first announced the Snapdragon 400 and 800 chips at the Consumer Electronics Show this past January, the company said the 800 series will appear in “premium” mobile devices in the second half of the year and provide as much as a 75 percent performance boost over Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon S4 chip.

The 800-series chips include a quad-core CPU, known as the 28-nm Krait 400, with each core running at up to 2.3 GHz. It has a new Adreno 330 GPU, integrates a 4G LTE modem for data rates of up to 150 Mbps, and supports the 802.11ac WiFi standard.

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Internet tools are just starting to be applied to industrial tasks such as maintaining equipment and optimizing operations, but the wealth of data being produced by industrial systems could make this a major focus of development in the coming years.

On Tuesday, General Electric increased its bet on this proposition by introducing a cloud platform for data management and recruiting partners to help it serve industrial customers. At an event in San Francisco, GE and its partners, including

Microsoft is upping the stakes in the growing market for cloud-based ERP, with its Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 products now available for deployment on its Azure service.

The launch, announced Tuesday, gives customers another option for cloud-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) services besides NetSuite, SAP Business ByDesign and others. It’s a bit late in coming, as Microsoft originally said availability