NHS IT projects could be in line for cutbacks following this week's pre-budget report. Chancellor Alistair Darling told The Andrew Marr Show yesterday that the report, due to be published on Wednesday, will provide guidance on which areas of public spending were likely to be cut.

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.

More details of the G-Cloud - the proposed government-wide cloud computing platform - have emerged. The G-Cloud will feature the hinted-at app store, according to Martin Bellamy, the director of the office of chief information officer at the Cabinet Office, and will make use of both public and private datacentres.

Feeling festive? Then you need silicon.com's seasonal guide to the best Christmas apps for Apple's iPhone. First up is the Solar System app, a cosmic take on the advent calendar that lets you journey to the earth's neighbouring planets.

With so many businesses looking to cut costs, shared services have become a popular option. Stuart Roberts offers advice on making them deliver. I think everyone agrees that since mid-2008 the economic situation has been somewhat difficult, with all the cutting of costs and jobs.

SAP has delayed price rises for its customers following a slip in the timing of a user benchmarking scheme. Earlier this year SAP users ordered the software company to meet a new set of key performance indicators in order to justify support price rises proposed last year.

Picture the scene: the year is 2016 and ID cards have been embraced by the British public, with most UK citizens now carrying their very own card. This increasingly unlikely scenario is how the government initially envisaged the ID card scheme would turn out way back in 2006.

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.

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?

Working out your budgets and trying to figure out the tech priorities for your HR department in 2010? Nick Heath has a few suggestions for HR directors as to where to invest that cash on technology to get the most benefits for your team and the rest of the business. Consider standardising your systemsTake a look at what you do in the HR department and the chances are a number of companies are doing exactly the same thing: processes like payroll and benefits administration or training and recruitment will need to be carried out at any large organisation. As a result, adopting standardised systems for common processes is worth considering for enterprises that are relying on expensive, bespoke IT systems.

Compiled on the M6 driving to Liverpool and dispatched to silicon.com a couple of weeks later via a free wi-fi connection in my hotel. I just cannot work any faster or smarter - I seem to have exhausted every degree of freedom, every element of efficiency improvement I can muster.

The Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California, is a community of hackers who have come together to work on projects, collaborate, and share expertise in technology and entrepreneurship. The Dojo, which opened in July, offers classes and a place to share ideas. Earlier this month the Dojo hosted the Random Hacks of Kindness event, which brought together thinkers and coders to try to solve real-world problems related to disaster relief.

eBay has released an app for BlackBerry. The application, co-developed by the auction site and RIM, lets users search, track and buy items using their smartphone.

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.

The National Identity Register - the database behind the ID card scheme - contains more than 500 names after a month of operation. The database went live on 20 October, and the identity commissioner Sir Joseph Pilling said it contains 538 names as of 19 November.

The icy winds of economic gloom have put paid to talk of a tech skills shortage - at least for now, the exclusive 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey can reveal. While the proportion of respondents reporting empty IT seats dipped in 2008 after several years of rising steadily, this year's result shows a much steeper decline as the worldwide economic recession mothballs big tech projects and puts recruitment hopes on ice. With less positions for job hunters to choose from it seems employers are having less difficulty filling the few vacancies that do pop up.

SAP needs to better communicate with customers about the products in its portfolio as well as the technology it's developing. That's according to customers attending the SAP UK and Ireland SAP user group conference in Manchester this week when asked what the business software company could improve on.

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.

A second iPhone worm has been identified. Like the first worm - unearthed last month - to attack iPhones, this latest exploit also affects jailbroken devices with SSH (secure shell) protocol-enabled and unchanged default passwords.

Outsourcing deals typically promise to deliver cost savings and increased efficiency - but all too often the promises fail to match the reality. At the National Outsourcing Association's Sourcing Summit last week, two heads of IT shared their experiences of how to get the best out of outsourcing agreements and make sure they're delivering long-term value.

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.

Despite the cost-cutting forced on many organisations by the recession, pay packets for the IT management team have held up - and for some even grown. According to the exclusive silicon.com 2009 Skills Survey a greater proportion of IT chiefs are now taking home bigger pay packets than in last year's survey.

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.