Apple has bought streaming music service Lala for an undisclosed amount. A spokesman for Apple confirmed the acquisition to silicon.com sister site CNET News.com on Sunday.

Intel debuted and demonstrated its Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) processor on Wednesday. The processor has 48 cores - 24 dualcore "tiles" - connected with a high-speed mesh network. Intel wants the experimental chip, at least 100 of which it'll distribute to researchers in 2010, to lead to new attempts to tackle multicore system and software design. Ultimately, Intel believes its aggressive multicore approach will be the way computers get enough power for tasks such as vision and speech comparable to what humans have.

This month saw California's Hacker Dojo host the Random Hacks of Kindness event, which brought independent coders together with developers from Google, Microsoft, Nasa, Yahoo! and other organisations to work on projects to help with disaster relief. See more photos from the hackathon here.

Server virtualisation is rapidly becoming an accepted part of the corporate IT infrastructure - and now industry experts are predicting that it won't be long until corporate desktops follow suit. Desktop virtualisation refers to the running of a PC's operating system within a central datacentre. Users have a screen and terminal (or thin client) on their desk, which connects to the operating system running on the server via the local network. To the user, the experience is similar to the operating system running on their physical machine but in reality the processes are run and the data is stored in a central location.

Shared services delivered through the cloud will help the public sector shave billions from its annual IT spend, according to a leaked Whitehall report. The leaked draft document, Government ICT Strategy: New world, new challenges, new opportunities, sets out priorities for public sector IT chiefs through to 2020.

November's top stories on silicon.com tackled some big questions: does my business need an office? Can I work solely on a netbook? Will the UK ever create a Google, Microsoft or Oracle of its very own? November also dealt with the perennial question of will the UK's ID cards programme ever run to plan?

Zurich Financial Services has announced an outsourcing megadeal. The company said yesterday is has signed a 10 and a half year deal with CSC to supply datacentre and IT services.

Considering hitting the shops at the weekend? Looking for inspiration? Check out the latest in our series of gadget mini-reviews, courtesy of silicon.com's sister site CNET.co.uk, the home of technology reviews. For the full review and details, click on the link below. What is it:Multi-function inkjet printer with wireless connectivity

Apple's Mac Mini could really have become the "most important Mac", as Steve Jobs once called it. Seb Janacek explains what happened instead. As a Mac user it's not often I gaze admiringly at the product pages on Dell's website but this week was a notable exception.

At Orange's biannual La Collection event in Paris, the mobile operator gives a sneak peek at the technology set for future release. silicon.com went along to the 10th La Collection event last week to take a look at the gadgets and services set to make their way into consumers' hands in the coming months and years.

Mobile maker Sony Ericsson has debuted another phone in its Xperia range - but with a twist. The see-through display is a world first, according to Sony Ericsson, requiring battery, memory card and antenna to be miniaturised to fit inside the bottom portion of the device.

The privileged users that manage your IT systems must be monitored as closely - if not more - than standard users, says Bob Tarzey. Within any organisation, a small group of employees have the ability to wreak havoc on its IT infrastructure: the privileged users that manage it. Granting privileges to such users is necessary for them to be able to do their job but when things go wrong the consequences can be serious.

Losing a mobile device is a common occurrence - but that's doesn't mean it's not serious. Jon Collins looks at what businesses can do to protect themselves from this vulnerability. These days, it's no surprise to anybody that staff mobility - everything from home working to being able to pick up email when out and about - brings with it a business advantage.

At its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles last week, Microsoft gave attendees a close-up look at a self-contained server unit from one of the company's datacentres. This particular unit had been stationed outside Microsoft's datacentre in Washington. Photo credit: Ina Fried/CNET

Google Chrome, that's just a web browser isn't it?Not anymore. Google have used their Chrome browser as the basis for a new operating system that shares the same name. Don't tell me I have to shell out for another OS, I've just bought Windows 7.You wouldn't be able to buy the Chrome OS even if you wanted to. Firstly it's free, and secondly you will not be able to install it on existing machines. The OS will only come pre-installed on new computers, initially on netbooks from the latter part of 2010.

Google released the source code for Chrome OS on Thursday, beginning the process of producing a browser-based operating system by the end of 2010 for lower-end PCs called netbooks. Although Linux runs under the covers, the applications all run within Google's browser. The upper-left corner has an applications menu with links to a variety of web applications. Those applications can be permanently lodged as narrow tabs between that menu and ordinary browser tabs.

Adoption rates of virtualisation have yet to match the hype surrounding it, here Andrew Donoghue hears from businesses who've already taken the plunge. Despite vendors touting the numerous benefits that virtualisation can bestow on businesses that adopt the technology, there is a flaw in the rhetoric that is hard to get around: not many companies are actually adopting virtualisation.

This week saw chipmaker Qualcomm taking the wraps off a range of hardware powered by its Snapdragon platform. Among the devices on show was this Quanta smartbook prototype (pictured above and below) which runs the Google Android OS.

Could some of the big names in outsourcing be among the victims of the much-hyped shift to cloud computing? As businesses begin to host their IT systems in the cloud - instead of hiring outsourcers to maintain and integrate their systems - outsourcers could start to feel the pain, according to author and technology thinker Nicholas Carr.

Here's a look inside Apple's latest Manhattan store in New York US. Photo: Sarah Tew/CNET

Money transfer, location-based services and mobile health monitoring are likely to be among the most widespread mobile applications within the next three years. The increasing adoption of smartphones and the success of app stores has ignited the mobile apps market (follow the link for silicon.com's run down of the top iPhone apps for business).

Not every smartphone has a touchscreen - as Nokia's latest device shows. The E72, pictured above, is the latest addition to Nokia's business-focused Eseries line-up.

Microsoft's cloud-based computing platform Azure has been given an official launch date. Azure will be made commercially available from 1 January, Microsoft's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, announced yesterday at the company's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles.

Michael Chui is a senior fellow of the McKinsey Global Institute, the economics research arm of analyst house McKinsey & Company. In an exclusive interview, silicon.com reporter Tim Ferguson spoke to Chui about the report he co-authored on how CIOs can overcome the significant challenges posed by the business world emerging from the global recession into the 'new normal'.

Unified comms holds plenty of promise but businesses hoping to use it must first consider why uptake has been so slow, says Jim Mortleman. Vendors may be making a lot of noise about unified communications and collaboration (UCC) but the promised panacea remains a pipe dream for most organisations. Despite having been touted as the likely number two strategic technology for 2008 by Gartner, it fell to number five on the 2009 list and does not appear at all in the analyst's top 10 for 2010.