Former school friends Rob Taub and Nick Kenton started a free online directory listing all the sports clubs in Britain. They hoped it would make money by attracting advertising.
They had obtained an unsecured bank loan of £12,500 from Barclays and had combined savings of £12,500 to get the business going. They planned to employ an […]

 
Plenty of companies sell log cabin kits. But Argos seems to be the first major retailer to market an attractive and affordable model that reportedly can be built in two days by just two people. The British retailer’s basic five-room cabin, measuring roughly 32×17 feet or 8×5 meters, costs GBP 10,999. An upgraded model, with […]

 
Liu Keli couldn’t tell you much about South Carolina, not even where it is in the United States. It’s as obscure to him as his home region, Shanxi province, is to most Americans.
But Liu is investing $10 million in the Palmetto State, building a printing-plate factory that will open this fall and hire 120 workers. […]

 
Sometimes during peak hours, the phones are silent in Andy Freitas’ pizza restaurants, yet the cooks are busy keeping pace with hungry customers.
That’s because orders are rolling in through the Internet.
“It’s pretty amazing not to hear a phone ring on a busy night,” said Freitas, an operating partner with the largest Papa John’s franchisee in […]

 
TLG Education, the high- profile business set up by one of Scotland’s female entrepreneur role models Norma Corlette, has gone into liquidation with all of its 20 staff made redundant.
The company’s website says it works with 100,000 young people every year and is “one of the largest and most successful education training providers of its […]

 
Planes are viewed as an obvious source of pollution. The same is not true of the computer industry.
Yet the information and communications technology industry - or ICT - is responsible for the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions as those from planes.
Each year, both sectors emit 2% of total CO2 emissions, though there are signs […]

Chinese households will have the third greatest spending power in the world within a decade, leapfrogging their British counterparts.
Barclays Wealth and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) ranked China’s total household sector spending power at number seven in 2007. The UK was ranked third.
But in a global forecast released today, Barclays and the EIU will say […]

 
People have the idea of Silicon Valley or Technology Companies in general being built by freckle-faced, gawky 17 year old teenagers with a knack for building companies in a garage from nothing!Think more like a balding 39 year old with Masters or PhD degrees, having gained a lot of experience in mature companies before they […]

 
Was Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo a good deal? Was JP Morgan’s Bear Stearns deal a win? Did YouTube score big with its $1.65 billion acquisition by Google?
The answers depend on whom you ask and their perspective. Getting a good deal also has a lot to do with business decisions that are made in advance of […]

 
Hugh Osmond, one of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs, gave warning this weekend that he and other business owners are considering leaving Britain because of worsening relations with the Government and HM Revenue & Customs.
Osmond, who has amassed a £350m fortune through businesses such as Pizza Express and Punch Taverns, is increasingly worried at the […]