wefinda small business weekly news - 16th of August 2010

Top spot this week goes to the Bank of England inflation report with the Governor, Mervyn King, predicting inflation is likely to stay above the 2% target until the end of 2011. Whilst this is partly due to the VAT rise at the beginning of 2011, the Governor predicts continued choppy times ahead with downward pressure coming from spare capacity in the job market pushing down wages and continued uncertainty over bank lending.

One piece of potentially good news was the release of Germany’s growth figures for the second quarter. At 2.2%, the growth was well above expectation and helped the Eurozone as a whole to post overall growth of 1%. With the UK already having reported second quarter growth figures of 1.1%, we have one indicator that Europe may be on the way to recovery.

Mixed news on the housing front with the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors reporting an overall fall in house prices in July. With only London and the North West bucking the trend, the fall seems to be as a result of more properties being put on the market combined with a fall in demand. As many people are still reluctant to move, this could be good news for SMEs in the home improvement trade with house renovations and improvements being preferred to moving.

For those of you with an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, Apple released a patch this week which fixed a flaw in the PDF application which would have left the devices open to hackers. More information about the release can be found on the Apple website, search for release iOS 4.0.2 for iPhone and iPod touch or iOS 3.2.2 for iPad.

Action fraud is warning us to watch out for scam phone calls and e-mails which appear to come from HMRC asking for bank details to enable them to pay tax rebates. Over 180 websites sending out fake HMRC emails have been closed in the last 3 months alone. HMRC will never phone or e-mail asking for bank details so keep alert.

In view of the response to last week’s piece on the company which increased its turnover by 400% due to improved SEO, wefinda is putting together a SEO hints article. Watch out for it on our blog soon and in the meantime, if you have a good news story, share it with us on mail@wefinda.co.uk.

And finally, if you are looking to take on staff but still failing to find the right people, perhaps your job titles need tweaking. The South Australian government is trying to entice more young British backpackers to visit on a one year working visa. Jobs such as “shark personality profiler” and “roo-poo harvester” are on offer alongside “koala catcher” and even “beer taster”. Let us know if you have come across any unusual job titles and we’ll share them with the wefinda community.