£150k’s worth of prize money and professional services to be won

Steve Morgan is today launching The Morgan Foundation’s 2008 Entrepreneur Awards with over £150,000 of cash prizes and services on offer to the winners.

Following the huge success of last year’s inaugural awards, businesses and entrepreneurs from Merseyside, West Cheshire, Shropshire and North Wales once again have the opportunity to compete across five categories for a potentially major boost to their enterprise.

Designed to encourage a whole new generation of entrepreneurial role models, the return of the awards for 2008 were today being marked at a launch at Barclays in Liverpool.

With Steve now chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers, and the Morgan Foundation providing substantial annual support to the club’s Wolves Aid charity, the initiative has this year been extended to include the Wolverhampton area.

With main sponsorship provided by Barclays Commercial, there are dual launches to this year’s award scheme, with today’s event following a similar one held at Molineux Stadium yesterday.

Having launched his business life by using a £5,000 loan from his father to help found one of the UK’s most successful house builders in Redrow, before moving on to a variety of property and leisure based businesses,  Steve is now hoping to help similarly ambitious entrepreneurs and young businesses achieve their potential.

Applications for the various categories must be submitted by September 12 with a panel of distinguished judges then selecting the finalists. For more details, and to download an application form, visit: www.mf-awards.co.uk

Those individuals or companies short-listed will then be assessed and a short film made of their businesses to be screened at the Awards Ceremony at Carden Park Hotel on November 20.

The final judging panel for the awards will include Steve himself.

The above photograph shows:

Nick Ashfield (Winner 2007 - Best Potential Business, Championship Miniature Golf), John Powell (Barclays Commercial), Steve Morgan , Chris Larkin (Winner 2007 - Best New Business, So Baby)

One of the things that’s common across pretty much the whole world of work, apart from biscuits, is access to lots of paper. Despite talk of a ‘paperless office’, we all know such a thing doesn’t exist. And who’d want it to? Paper is very handy. Portable, cheap, recyclable, versatile. Like a PDA, but thinner.

So, it’s nice to come across a post like the one over on Lifehacker that lists Ten Printable Paper Productivity Tools. These tricks show you how to turn a humble (hopefully recycled) sheet of office paper into a range of handy doo-dabs to make your life easier.

They include:

• A paper CD case - by far my favourite, offering cheap and customizable decorative oppprtunities for those home-burned CDs
• Printable graph paper - for when you absolutely, positively must have a neatly proportioned diagram
• A paper wallet - yes, a wallet made of paper
• A 3-D 12-sided desk calendar - to relive your Dungeons & Dragons youth
• A mini paper pocket organiser - for organising you life, not your pockets

Plus lots of other calendar / organiser / chart thingies to reign yourself in with. Plus lots of suggestions for others in the post’s comments.

Check out the full list here then get printing and folding!

On Friday, the Chamber’s Chinalink team sent out and invitation to a luncheon event. This message was subsequently duplicated to everyone on the mail list. Liverpool Chamber of Commerce would like to apologise sincerely for the inconvenience that this email has caused to all recipients

An error in the dispatch of the email has caused it to be sent on multiple occasions to all members. This was an honest mistake by a young member of the Chamber’s staff and we are working hard to mitigate the consequences for Members. This has never happened before and our ICT team have already put preventative measures in place to avoid any possible future recurrence.

It seems that the reason for this problem is a Microsoft SBS Server issue. This occurs when an SBS Server has been implemented in a company and the required patches have not been installed. The result is that if emails are sent in the TO field and an address within this list is incorrect, the offending server will continue to send to all in the list.

After examining a number of the messages in question, it is clear that although the Liverpool Chamber’s mail server sent the original email, it was then propagated and re-sent to all members by the offending SBS mail server(s) and that, sadly, is beyond our control. It was a regrettable mistake by the member of staff in question to send any mail in the TO field and this is being dealt with internally, but it is worth noting that while we started this sorry affair, Liverpool Chamber’s mail server was not responsible for the problems that have occurred.

We are now actively involved with external companies whose servers have the outlined problem and are working with them to solve the problem, in the meantime if everyone could be patient and please not reply to the offending emails as this adds to the problem of people’s mail boxes getting full. If you require further information or assistance please feel free to call our switch board (0151 227 1234) and ask to be put through to the IT department.

Regards

Jack Stopforth

Chief Executive, Liverpool Chamber of Commerce

Network Rail are running a new taxi sharing scheme, so passengers arriving at Euston can get where they’re going faster, save money - and cut their carbon footprint too.

• Weekday mornings between 8.00am and 10.00am - if there are long queues
• Collect a destination zone voucher from a Taxi Share Marshal
• Go to the priority loading bays
• A Marshal shows you to your shared taxi
• Pay the driver the fixed fare shown on your voucher (see map to right)
• Each passenger gets dropped off in turn, according to the best and quickest route decided by your driver

For more information, please speak to a member of Network Rail’s station team or visit www.networkrail.co.uk/euston