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It's time for the CBI to break the mould and maybe pick someone from small business to run the show, according to business leader Lord Jones. Director General Richard Lambert is stepping down early and Digby Jones, who had the job before Lambert, has told the press the CBI needs to 'break the mould and appoint a woman, someone from an ethnic minority background or from the world of small businesses as a successor'.
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Take a look at this rather fetching diagram of the psychology of a market cycle.
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Turning your handwriting into a font has now become a reality with Pilot - the pen makers.
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At The Daily Beast, there's an article about the truth behind Sockington, a cat whose Twitter account has 1.5 million followers.
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Take a look at our quick video update on this week's SME news, including the impact of the new emergency budget on small businesses.
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As football is on everyone's minds today, let me borrow a popular metaphor and say that yesterday's Emergency Budget is a game of two halves – of cutting costs and raising revenue.
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Unilever has made an ice-cream vending machine that can tell when you're smiling (and that tries to get you to smile if you're not). If you are, it will offer you a free ice-cream and take your photo, which can then be shared with people online.
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As the title suggests, this is an (online) map that shows where trains are on London Underground. Admittedly one has to wait less time for a tube train than an overground one, but this is still quite useful. As it happens, it's especially so for us since our office is very close to a tube station.
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Many of our customers are business owners who have taken the plunge and gone out on their own. This is a difficult decision to make and is very admirable one. So, what is the hardest thing about making this leap?
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A few days ago we posted a story about how BP was supposedly buying search terms on Google and Yahoo, so that people looking for 'oil slick' would see the company's own website come first in the list of paid-for results.
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We have all had bad days at work where we just cannot face the tasks ahead of us, many of us will just struggle through but some of us will be more deviant in an effort to avoid work...
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I've been reading a story from The Washington Post, where the writer talks about his hoarding habit. As a kid, his room was so messy that his dog used to use it like a garden. And I don't mean frolicking through the flowers. His hoarding continued into adulthood and, pleasingly, he talks about having too many pens. (If you're a hoarder, please make sure to hoard stuff from us.)
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You can loosen your belt a notch or two – the UK government is going to borrow £8bn less this year than we first thought. We only need to run up public debt of £155bn instead of £163bn, according to figures from the new Office for Budget Responsibility.
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Tyler Brûlé, founder of Monocle magazine, has written an interesting piece for the FT in which he questions the use of out-of-office messages (OOM). To summarise, Brûlé says that for people in positions of power in a company, or those responsible for other people's jobs, the OOM can be inappropriate.
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There are many ways to resign from a job. In dark moments towards the end of our term in a job we probably all dream of going out in a blaze of glory, giving all those who we feel deserve it a piece of our mind and then heading for the pub to celebrate a heroic exit.
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Entrepreneurship is difficult to define but basically it means being innovative and creative and then having the practical skills to deliver something new that is profitable. How can we encourage people in the UK to achieve as entrepreneurs.
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Leeds has an estimated population of 708,000. That's almost the 725,000 public sector jobs which could be axed over the next five years according to a warning from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development.
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I found some pictures of a very cool looking butchers in Australia. It made me think how branding, for that's what outfitting a shop is, can really affect the perception of a business.
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There's been a lot of talk recently about people possibly bunking work to watch the World Cup. So you'll be surprised to hear that the number of 'absence' days in the UK actually fell last year, according to the CBI.
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Apparently, BP has bought the search term ' oil spill' on Google and Yahoo, so that the company is the first link to appear when the words are searched for. I admit that I'm not a PR expert, but this doesn't seem like a very good idea.
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Wouldn't life be more interesting if office products with moving parts were transparent? Or designed to look appealing?
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Facebook, Linked in, checking the sports results or maybe even a sly spot of poker at lunch time...With many small businesses operating open internet policies nowadays how responsible are you with your freedom?
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Here's a very interesting video about performance-related pay. To summarise, for certain types of work it might actually worsen employee performance. What kind of work and why? Well, telling you that would spoil the fun!
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Fancy getting creative with some accessories for your smartphone - here are a few Youtube vids that we found that use every day office supplies to create some custom accessories for your phone
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This is our weekly round up of news for small businesses, we have focused on identity theft and how this is costing small businesses dearly as well as also looking at how small businesses have become more efficient recently.
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Boffins at Stanford University in the US have been trying to solve a problem we all recognise, that batteries weigh an awful lot. And they have found the answer in common or garden office paper.
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The World Cup is only 10 days away and small businesses should be thinking about flexitime for staff, so they don't have to bunk or pull sickies for footie. Of course, you could always buy a TV set for the office, and that would keep them glued to their desks.
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