Back in the late 1950s, the then head of IBM, Thomas J Watson, was rumoured to have predicted a potential world market for "maybe five computers", an estimate that illustrates how radically the role of the computer has changed.

With bid speculation swirling around the London Stock Exchange (LSE) since its planned merger with TMX fell apart in June, last night the bourse was pushed up the mid-tier index as vague rumours spread that it could receive an approach from its Hong Kong peer.

The Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo is set to increase its share of the European market after agreeing to take over the German electronics retailer Medion in a $900m (£550m) deal.

Private equity group Bain Capital is targeting software group Micro Focus International and is preparing an offer that could be as much as £890m.

Business history is littered with highly successful and admired companies that then went into decline and ended up beset by crises and outrun by the competition. They failed to understand that the most successful time in a company's life is its most dangerous time, because the very reasons for its success can also be the seeds of its downfall.

There aren't many quiz shows where the stakes are high for anyone but the participants but in the special episodes of Jeopardy! on American television this week, the hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money are very much an afterthought. The real prize: humanity's continued supremacy in the ongoing struggle to preserve our status against computers. And, last night it was confirmed: man has been trumped by machine.

IBM's 'Watson' supercomputer competes against top human competitors on 'Jeopardy' to test the use of artificial intelligence .

For thousands of hopeful commuters in China's capital, 2011 started with a click, not a bang.

Benoit Mandelbrot, the Polish-born mathematician who played a central role in Chaos theory, has died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 85, of cancer.

Ex?

Mark Papermaster, the Apple executive in charge of iPhone engineering, has left the company weeks after the "Antennagate" controversy over complaints of poor reception on the company's latest smartphone.

Microsoft posted a bigger-than-expected 60 per cent jump in quarterly profit, helped by strong sales of Windows 7, and said it expected business technology spending to recover this year.

Gordon Brown said he did not want the recession to herald a repeat of the "lost generation of the 1980s" as he welcomed a new employment scheme for young people.