The month in pictures: May

The month kicked off with the launch of the super-thin Asus Seashell netbook, which is only 1in thick and weighs in at just over 1kg.

IBM held its annual Impact SOA event in Las Vegas in early May. Along with unveling its CloudBurst private cloud appliance and BPM BlueWorks, Big Blue also invited Hollywood star Billy Crystal along to liven up proceedings. Here he invites Sandy Carter, vice president for IBM SOA and WebSphere Marketing, to join him on stage to help reenact a classic movie scene.

The final pre-release candidate of Windows 7 went live on 6 May. Among the key features are new security protections and a virtualised XP Mode for legacy software. Parallels is also preparing a virtualisation tool that will let users continue to run Windows XP applications on Windows 7 systems, putting it in direct competition with Microsoft's Windows XP Mode.

T-Mobile began rolling out the next version of the Google Android platform to its customers in the UK. The eagerly anticipated Android 1.5 Cupcake update adds touch-screen keyboard capabilities, and new components that let users shoot video on the handset and upload directly to YouTube.

More than one in four software installations in the UK is illegal, according to a new report from the Business Software Alliance. The organisation's 2008 Piracy Study revealed that the amount of pirated software on PCs in the UK has risen to 27 per cent over the past year, clocking up its highest chunk of the market ever. The BSA estimates that the cost to British industry is £1.49bn.

The European Commission fined Intel £950m for breaking European anti-trust regulations, the largest fine the body has issued in European history. European commissioner for Competition Policy Neelie Kroes suggested that the chip giant should change its tag line from 'sponsor of the future' to 'sponsor of the European taxpayer'.

Vodafone announced it is to drop international roaming charges during the summer, allowing customers to make international calls for the same cost as a UK call. The offer applies to business customers as well as consumers, the mobile operator said.

EMC held its annual customer and partner event in Orlando in May. Key announcements from the show included the launch of Atmos Online, a web-delivered version of its cloud storage service, and tight integration between EMC, VMware and Cisco products.

The much-anticipated Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine launched this month. The site differs from a regular search engine in that it processes queries to return the actual answers, instead of returning a list of web pages that may contain the result.

Intel extended its reach into the netbook market with Moblin 2.0, a Linux-based operating system designed for netbooks and nettops. Working together with Novell, the chip maker released a beta version of the platform, optimised for use with its Atom processors.