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The floating doorstep

We talk to the inventor of a product designed to boost Britain's flood defences about his struggle to find a backer.

Genius at work

For companies operating on the frontiers of technology, intellectual property is an essential defence. But it can also be a cash cow, an exit tool or even a weapon against competitors. GrowthBusiness investigates.

YouTube in the workplace

Banning YouTube and Facebook tends to be among the first entries on a company’s internet policy.

Plastic Logic to launch reader

Almost a decade after the company was set up, electronics innovator Plastic Logic is ready to launch its first product.

The IRIScan 2

Optical character recognition has come a long way since those early days of feeding typewritten pages into your desktop scanner. Now it’s gone portable.

Shareholder revolts on the up

Shareholder activism is on the march, provoked by bad corporate stewardship, the inevitable disappointments of business in a downturn, changes in the law and a new breed of opportunistic investor. GrowthBusiness investigates.

Next big thing: automated call-centres

Along with airport car parks and fake tan, call centres are one of the great ills of the modern world. A company based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Artingence, believes it has discovered the antidote.

Email overload

Email is an indispensable part of the modern office, but for those who hate to delete, storing millions of messages can become a headache. We look at how football club Tottenham Hotspur tackled the problem.

Exploding laptops

Hazel Blears made headlines when a laptop containing sensitive files was stolen from her constituency office. Here’s how she could have protected the data.

Digital dictation on the move

There are more and more things you can now do on the move, from catching up with your emails to watching TV. Now that most anachronistic of activities, dictating to your secretary, has been brought into the 21st century.

Web analytics: why bother?

Internet marketing is big business – search spending alone is expected to more than double to $18.5 billion (£9.25 billion) by 2012, according to Jupiter Research, and that’s just the money businesses are feeding into search engines to get prospects to glance at their sites.

VoIP via your mobile

Technology moves quickly and voice over internet protocol (VoIP) is no longer tied to the desktop PC. It’s now possible to make VoIP calls on a handheld device such as a mobile, which saves lugging a laptop around as well as cutting the cost of international calls.

Laptop security demystified

As recent losses of government laptops have shown, it’s all too easy to lose critical data. While preventing theft can be difficult, there are several tools available to help secure valuable information.

Desktop virtualisation

One size rarely fits all when it comes to IT, and many businesses are finding they can reduce costs and improve flexibility by adopting desktop virtualisation to bring computing power to their employees.

Tomorrow’s world wide web

The internet has created opportunities for entrepreneurs everywhere. GrowthBusiness talks to some of them about burgeoning trends in online business

"There's no such thing as failure, only feedback"

The challenges David Ferry faced when starting and growing his business, Ferry Financial.

"The Business is out there"

Neil O'Connell's advice for budding entrepreneurs is "don't panic".

"There's no such thing as failure, only feedback"

David Ferry set up his business, Ferry Financial, because he believed there was a better way to do financial management