2011 may have been stressful with the economic downturn but a new Work-Life Balance Index published by workspace provider Regus suggests things were actually an improvement over 2010.

The index based on the views of 2500 UK professionals suggested that while most people are putting in longer hours than before, 60% of the people surveyed are enjoying their jobs more and 58% of them feel they have enough time to balance work with home life or personal pursuits. 69% even suggest they are being more productive at work too.

In all, the Index registered a 20% rise in the UK work-life balance between 2010 and 2012. However, in global terms the UK still lags behind, with an index now of 104 while the global average stands at 124.

The report surrounding the index suggests the findings show an increase in business confidence and people becoming adjusted to the fact that it can’t get much worse. It also suggests that happier staff are more productive, which is a good reason to making sure you treat your employees as your most important asset.

Has your own work-life balance improved?

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There are a growing number of bloggers across the globe earning a proper and respectable wage from their online writing projects and understandably more and more bloggers or would be bloggers or content creators are keen to collect their slice too.

Until now that has been a bit difficult. Positive comments are nice but don’t pay the bills and pushing a link towards a paypal donation is never looked upon as the most professional approach to ask for some reward. A number of microdonation services have sprung up in recent years, claiming to hold the answer, some have been and gone, others appear to have more longevity.

One that appears to be getting a foothold is Flattr. A service aimed at all those positive comment leavers to leave a monetary tip for the content creators too. This week they have announced a deal that could at least put there service under the noses of more and more potential users, and they hope, lead to a groundswell and movement towards tipping for online content your have enjoyed. The deal is with Dailymotion, the biggest video portal behind the giant that is YouTube. Those uploading to Dailymotion now have the option to include a Flattr button onto their channels and on the credits of each video, so you can appeal for donations or tips to earn money from your shared content without the need for a pre-roll ad that so often frustrates.

The concept behind Flattr aims to avoid the barrier of constantly re-entering card details or the like, and takes on the strength of the like button of Facebook by tipping from a pre-paid ‘pot’ with a minimum of just 2 Euro investment per month of which Flattr takes a 10% service fee.  A relatively small investment but in the world of social media, becoming known as the person doing good deeds and genuinely rewarding others could have almost unquantifiable long-term benefits.

Whether this latest move by Dailymotion will kickstart the concept remains to be seen, but in a world where the debate over paid-for-content still rages, this may be the next ‘acceptable’ step for many, especially if the correct ‘well-meaning’ spin is put on the regime.

Are you using Flattr or any other micropayment service? Are there enough ‘good-hearted’ people about for the scheme to ever take off?

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This week’s Budget setting out the Government’s updated economic strategy wasn’t packed with too many surprises, but did you spot the main elements that may affect your business?

Whatever your politics, here’s our quick run down of the main points you may like to look at in more depth. You can find full details of the Budget announcements on the HM Treasury website

Super-connected Cities

A re-confirmation that Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, London, Manchester and Newcastle have been selected to become broadband super-connected cities. The £100 million investment was first announced in the 2011 Autumn Statement and a further £50m has been announced to fund a second wave of cities.

Corporation Tax cut

In an attempt to spur on more companies to drive the economy forward, the main rate of corporation tax is to be reduced by an additional one per cent. The rate will now reduce from 26 per cent to 24 per cent in April 2012 and then to 23 per cent in April 2013 before a further reductio to 22 per cent by April 2014.

Corporation Tax relief for certain tech

Subject to final state aid approval, new Corporation Tax reliefs will be introduced from April 2013 for the video games, animation and high-end television industries.

Simplification of small business taxation

The Government has announced a consultation, reference introducing a voluntary cash basis for unincorporated businesses up to the VAT registration threshold as well as a simplified expenses system for business use of cars, motorcyles and homes as well as the possibility of a disincorporation relief.

VAT Threshold increase

From this April, the VAT taxable turnover threshold, governing who must be registered for VAT will be increased from £73,000 to £77,000.

Income Tax changes

For those lucky enough to be earning over £150,000 you are probably well aware that the top rate of income tax will be reduced from 50% to 45% in April 2013. The key change however, affecting almost everybody in the working world, is the rise in the basic individual income tax personal allowance to increase by a further £1,100 – taking it to £9,205 in total – also by April 2013.

Enterprise Management Incentive Scheme

This scheme designed to help SMEs recruit and retain talent is set to provide additional support to help start-ups access the scheme and more than double the grant limit to £250,000. A more detailed blog about this scheme is already planned by 123-reg in the next few weeks.

Obviously, there are many other aspects that will impact on your business but we believe these will be the main items you probably need to be considering in the next few months. We will be following up on a number of these points in our business-focused blogs in the next few weeks.

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The chances are if you are running your own business, you regularly have business meetings or at least meet business contacts in coffee shops. Even if you have an office, it is often more convenient and being less formal, more friendly.

Amazingly, these sort of meetings are also very fruitful – they must be or we wouldn’t all keep holding them there. Now US academics have come up with some reasons as to why they are successful and in fact why we should spend more time in coffee shops too, to help our businesses.

The thing with coffee shops is that however busy or not busy they are, they are never quiet and researchers at the University of British Columbia are now saying that makes us more creative than being in a more sterile, less dynamic environment. Apparently, a little noise can go a long way towards getting you better ideas.

The study of over 300 participants comes close behnind other research that suggests that a that a flexible schedule has a positive effective on the health, happiness and productivity of employees – something that is sweet music to the ears of employers.

Participants showed better creative responses when playing word association games in an environment with the simialr noise level you would expect in a coffee shop, when compared to silent and loud and very loud environments. The researches describe this as “A moderate distraction, which induces processing difficulty, enhances creativity by prompting abstract thinking.”

While silent spaces tend to be grat for full concentration, when creativity is required, some stimulus helps get the creative juices flowing – althought his can easily be drowned out by too much noise too.

This could also explain why open-plan offices are often more productive than individual spaces and why many one-man businesses – especially creatives – choose co-working shared office space instead of working alone – whether they knew about the impact or not.

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As it battles to retain a hold on the mobile phone market Nokia has announced a deal to offer free wi-fi in London. Partnering with Spectrum Interactive, Nokia is to launch a two-month trial of a free wi-fi service in central London. If the trial proves successful, there are plans to extend the service in early 2012. With the Olympics and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2012, London is expecting record tourist numbers and with the majority of those expected to be part of the smartphone generation, WiFi will be a key asset in attracting customer loyalty.

Under the trial scheme Nokia has set up 26 wi-fi hotspots mostly concentrated around shopping areas in the West End of London and mainline rail stations. Users of the service will not need to register or sign in to the hotspots be located on public phone boxes owned and operated by Spectrum Interactive. To avoid abuse download speeds will be limited to a maximum of 1 megabit per user but more than enough for users to stay in touch via email etc.

Free wi-fi services are already widely available in London but usually within privately-owned buildings and frequently requiring payment for a service or product from the business hosting the WiFi signal. Often they also require sign-up to an account by a third-party operator, sometimes ‘free’ actually meaning purchase of a limited amount of data usage.

Other plans for free WiFi in the capital, including via the London Underground, in time for the London 2012 Olympics have been mooted but Nokia’s move is the first to go live.

Do you ever use public WiFi? If not, what puts you off?

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It probably won’t come into full force until 2013 but a vote this week by the EU’s Council of Ministers to adopt the Consumer Rights Directive, will mean greater protection for consumers buying online and further burdens on those selling via the internet.

The Directive has now been approved by both the EU Council of Ministers and the European Parliament and will come into force once it is published in the Official Journal of the European Union, with member states including the UK then having two years before they need to formally implement the measures in to national law.

The big change in the Directive is consumers being given a longer right to return distance-sold goods. Currently they are given 7 days, this will be extended to 14 under the new law (continuing the exemption for personalised goods etc).

Traders will also have to issue online consumers with a ‘model withdrawal form’. This would be used to return the goods and will need to include a whole host of information about the contract, including details of all fees and charges.

The new law will also prohibit the increasing trend of surcharges for certain payment methods, such as credit or debit cards. Traders will be allowed to pass on what it costs them to deliver the means of payment but no more.

The UK Government already recently announced plans to implement the requirements of the Consumer Rights Directive requirements into a catch-all new statute to incorporate the current piece-meal affair that covers consumer protection.

The new ruling could have an impact on the growing number of businesses starting-up and selling online, creating greater burdens on companies and additional costs when dealing with returns based simply on the customers change of mind.

If you run an online shop, what are your thoughts on the forthcoming changed? Do you already offer a 14 money-back guarantee?

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This morning the Official Google Code blog revealed the giant’s latest step towards world domination – a new web programming language called Dart.

In his blog post Lars Bak, Software Engineer, Dart Team, reveals just an early preview of Dart which he says aims to:

• Create a structured yet flexible language for web programming.
• Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn.
• Ensure that Dart delivers high performance on all modern web browsers and environments ranging from small handheld devices to server-side execution.

It’s a class-based programming language and Google has made the language and preliminary tools available as open source on dartlang.org where you can also find several code samples too.

While Google is saying this is an early preview it is also saying it wants to rapidly progress the language to be at the heart of development, so it appears with the dwindling Google Labs projects it is throwing it out to the wider developer community to help move it further forward.

We haven’t yet had time to play with it and at first glance are not sure what ground-breaking differences it will bring to the developer’s table. What you can bet though is that if the initial interest is strong, Google will invest heavily in it as controlling the very code developers use could further enhance the way Google control the way the web develops.

Have you seen Dart? What are your thoughts? Is there a need when Javascript is already so widely used and understood?

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It still is the real thing. Coca-Cola has been named the world’s most valuable brand for the 12th year running according to the respected Interbrand annual global brand report but Apple‘s value has increased by 58% year on year and at this rate will be challenging for a top three spot next year.

Coca-Cola’s valuation of US$71.9 billion puts it well clear from all except IBM, with even third placed Microsoft ‘only’ valued at just over US$59 billion. Apple in comparison is now valued at nearly US$33.4 billion in 8th from 17th position. These brands are so successful hey  could probably solve many of the world’s national debt problems just by using their name as security.

But what makes a brand? Here’s four considerations to start:

Phrase and Name

In the modern day at its basic, a brand means a phrase / name that is memorable. That means all assets using the same name too. So when you secure your domain name, secure the social media addresses to match too: Facebook, 123-reg, YouTube etc.

Unique Selling Points

USPs dictate a marketeers life, but differentiation is key to making your brand more successful than rivals. Obviously the points you differentiate on need to appeal to the customer too, but if you fail to show why you are better than a rival, you can bet your rival will be publicise how they differentiate from you and will probably pick up more custom.

Values and promise

A successful brand immediately promotes an ethos and way of doing things; values. As soon as a customer hears that brand name or sees a brand logo those values are understood. A brand ethos however must not only offer promise but also live up to that promise.

Reputation and responsiveness

What others think of you is important to any business. It is vital to a brand. Good quality products and customer service go hand and hand with a successful brand. Equally, successful brands need to be one step ahead of competition and new trends to ensure expectations are always met.

Yet that is just a start. What else do you think is essential to creating a brand?

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Facebook is about to get more important for Business. Fact.

I quite often hear people saying “Yeh, but Facebook is for family and friends not business, right?” and then normally spend the next 10 or 20 minutes to convince them it isn’t so. It doesn’t always work. To many, the informality of Facebook, the way you can banter with ex-school-mates and existing office colleagues alike, doesn’t lend itself well to ‘promoting a brand”. Yet last week’s announcement from Facebook about the changes coming to their portal is about to make Facebook even more important and a vital business tool.

We often recite the mantra of ‘Content is King’ and until now Facebook (despite already hosting 4% of all photographs ever taken in the world) hasn’t really towed the line with that one, until now. Facebook is moving to a more newsy type-look and will be placing content on a more newsworthy basis. Content now is very important on Facebook.

What changes?

From the 30th September (i.e. today) Facebook will no longer be driven by a long line of posts from those a user has linked to but instead a Timeline and a set of organised post. In fact it is an intelligent timeline that will create more a chronological story or scrapbook than just a series of posts. If you’ve ever seen the impressive Flipboard app on the iPad you will get the idea. Facebook is looking to organise us. That includes the basic like function. This is being opened out to developers given them more scope to create their own versions connected to online activities. That is likely to make users more savvy as to who, what and when they like.

So Facebook will decide what is relevant content to us and place this in our timeline. As a user though you won’t miss out on the other content completely, that will be available as part of a rolling ‘ticker’ on of each user’s home page.

Dspite this apparent information gatekeeping, Facebook claims the new changes will allow you more control over what appears as a top news item as, users will be given more options over these sorts of preferences via new setting controls.

The idea is that with one quick glance users will easily catch-up on the actions of their important friends over the past 24 hours without having to scroll through countless updates “you should see the things you’re most interested in” claim Facebook, yes but not necessarily the most recent. To the writer this move is perhaps more about understanding where Facebook sits alongside other social networks. During the recent UK riots, during live sporting events and reality tv shows, the ‘as live’ action and interaction has taken place on Twitter not Facebook. Twitter has almost become the default for immediacy, Facebook something more of a reflection. In tradtional analogy, Twitter is to TV and radio what Facebook is now becoming to newspapers and magazines. Again that makes content on Facebook even more important.

If you are a business, the stronger or more unique your message the better the chance it will attract interest from an audience. From a user perspective the chances are their top news will become stale for those who log on more than once per day, so any new engaging content will be lapped up

The true impact – and whether it makes Facebook users leave in droves or new sign-ups happen – won’t be seen for months yet, but we suggest you concentrate on ensuring what you have on Facebook is as up to date and relevant to your daily business as possible.

Let us know what you think of the new look Facebook.

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We’ve written before about how the way people view and use TV is changing, but the focus of interest for visitors at the latest IFA electronics fair in Berlin perhaps offered the biggest insight into the future.

It was not the further advanced 3DTV stands, where the 3D experience can be obtained without the need for sci-fi looking eye-ware, nor the latest tablet technology harvesting the same power as a standard desktop wielded this time last year. Instead it was the integration of television with the internet.

Samsung appears to be leading the way in connected TVs as they did in the early large-screen LCD markets. Already Samsung offers SmartTVs with internet technology built in, using a range of Samsung apps ready loaded on the equipment, but their newest models show true integration that suggests your TV in the corner of your sitting room could take over from your desktop or laptop for all your computer needs.

“But people watch differently nowadays” is the cry from many. True. This writer for one, will admit to ‘watching tv’ while working or surfing on a laptop or tablet and I don’t suppose I am the only one. Yet TV manufacturers know that too. With sociologists suggesting the art of social interaction is dying out because we are constantly engaged with one technology or another, the manufacturers are trying to combat that too. LG for instance, are set to bring out a new TV featuring a gaming mode that utilises 3D technology to allow viewers to see different pictures on the same screen – picture in picture being taken a step further.

With those sorts of changes happening in the living rooms of the masses, so web designers need to be thinking how that impacts on them. With possible future internet viewing taking place several metres away form the screen, small fonts and intricate designs could become a thing of the past. Furthermore, “the fold” could become even more important with no touchscreen control and possibly a move towards wand technology for control of the screen. Start making those considerations now and planning how best to meet the challenge and you could steal the march on your competitors.

How do you think truly interactive TV sets will impact on the work of a web designer?

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