I spotted a tweet early today from entrepreneur Oli Barrett about the Make Your Mark With A Tenner competition. Organised by Enterprise UK it is one of my favourite business competitions. School children around the UK are given loans of £10 and have four weeks to come up with a business idea which makes as much money as possible.

The results in 2009 were astounding.

I spent a very enjoyable two days in Cardiff this week at Voice10, the annual conference of the Social Enterprise Coalition. I've been to the event before but what was different this year was the involvement of Twitter. As many of you will know I'm a self-confessed twaddict so I was always going to be tweeting madly throughout the conference but I wasn't the only one. At one point the event hashtag, #Voice10, was the highest trending topic in the UK as the socially entrepreneurial Twitterati typed away on their iPhones, BlackBerries and laptops.

 There’s no denying that we are in a digital age.  Right now, it’s pretty advanced already – and we have digital experts and respected futurists making statements that in just 5 years time tangible media will no longer exist.

So please tell me what’s going to happen to banks?  In my experience of banking with banks, both personal and 

Yesterday I was sitting on a train trying very hard not to listen to two elderly people engaging in a loud discussion about politics. The topics discussed ranging from our participation in Europe to the welfare state. The arguments were fairly fascinating; an insight into how life has changed over the years. I am delighted to report that the phrase “it wasn’t like that in our day” was used more than once. My initial reaction was to dismiss their opinions, but on reflection I understand their conclusions. As humans we are biased towards our own life experiences, we form our views based on our own particular past.

I have a sneaking suspicion that endless networking (a daily diet of endless breakfasts, lunches, seminars, Ecademy, Twitter and LinkedIn) may not be the path to riches.

Yes, it will keep you busy but is it the smartest way to get the results you want? You end up managing loads of relatively shallow relationships. These will be mostly based on furious exchanges of business cards and listening to a diet of elevator pitches from people pretending to be interested in you.

For those of you that follow me on Twitter, then you may have been alerted to the fact that I was not too happy with the service levels at Symantec last week.

To provide a bit of context – I had a very simple query.  I received a notification advising me that I needed to renew my Norton 360 license with them – simple – and I did that no problem.

However, the license I have is for 3 machines, and I wanted to switch one of the licenses and see whether Linux platforms were supported in that license.  A quick call – or live chat query, or even email support would have sufficed.  The query could have been resolved in, say, 2 minutes.

I visited the ambitious and on-the-ball East Cheshire Chamber of Commerce on Thursday to listen to a talk by Bob Stewart, he of commanding the UK's Nato contingent in the Bosnia horror affair back in the early 90s fame.

Now, to be totally honest, I am usually deeply uneasy about using military langague in business for the risk that a winning at all costs mentality creeps in and that anyone who is not right there with you is automatically the enemy.

It's a bit like sport - the military is another one of those areas which seems as if it might have close links to business practice and we can quite easily slide across high performance practices and the business world will be all the better and all the higher performing.

But it's not quite as simple as that - in relation to both sport and the military, the world of commerce is a more complex arena entirely and the games that we play in business need to be much more long termist.

 Ok – I’m pretty IT savvy, and yet why is it that I still end up tearing my hair out when it comes to undertaking what should be a really ‘simple’ task.

I simply want to transfer the photos from my Blackberry to my laptop.  Now that shouldn’t be difficult at all should it?

I've been blogging about sustained action and sustainable motivation over the last week and some more ideas have developed over this weekend.

I was talking with my friend Richard Francis, whose early stage online letting agent and landlord services' portal is starting to show real momentum. This is because Richard is one of the best exponents of doing stuff I know - he is a master of sustained action. He tellingly said:

"I was thinking over New Year about how I am going to orientate myself into 2010. Now that we have our broad strategy proven, I am going to worry less about that. What I am going to do is to fill in as many little bits of the big picture as I can - but that's not a process that has any end.

"When I look around me I see that so many people think they are working towards an end point and they slow down and then they can get complacent, or never achieve any significant scale, or get swallowed by a new competitor. For me it's now about incremental and permanent growth in everything that I do."

Entrepreneurs have been having a hard time of it lately and if a comment yesterday by Conservative MP John Redwood is anything to go by, the number of business owners in the UK is dropping. In a debate on the Fiscal Responsibility Bill, he said:

"This morning I spoke to a successful entrepreneur who told me: 'I'm on strike. I was a successful entrepreneur. I sold my company because the climate was becoming so hostile in this country. I managed to sell up before the crash. I have no intention of going back in because they're making the climate even more hostile-I'll sit on my backside and do nothing for a bit.'"

What do you think? Is Britain a bad place in which to do business? Are you considering giving up until the entrepreneurial environment improves?