Sam and Harry walked away with the award for most original business concept.

Others highlighted include Daniel Ox of Fruit for the Office who transformed his family-run stall into an online e-commerce platform delivering fresh fruit and veg to office workers.  Daniel won young entrepreneur of the year.

The award for best female entrepreneur went to Sara Murray of Buddi the globally successful business Buddi which manufactures small GPS personal trackers, while best male entrepreneur went to Mitesh Soma of Chemist Direct who we’ve already featured here at SmallBizPod.

More details of the exhibition and the awards, run by BT Business can be found here.

BT Business has issued the pack as part of the support it’s giving to the Red Nose Climb, where a band of celebrities, including Chris Moyles, Gary Barlow and Cheryl Cole will climb Kilimanjaro to raise money for charity.

More details on the pack can be found at the Red Nose Climb for businesses site.

The big day itself takes place on 13 March 2009.

According to research commissioned by BT, 28% of small businesses believe that giving visitors the opportunity to use telephones and desks improves working relationships. BT therefore believes turning an SME’s existing broadband internet connection into a BT Openzone hub providing wifi access will also be seen positively. 

The integrity of BT business customers’ broadband connections is maintained with technology implemented to allow a virtual separate broadband connection for visitors and customers.

This can be turned into a full BT Openzone hub with vouchers offered for sale, if desired. Whether forcing visitors to pay for access will have quite the same beneficial effects in terms of building positives relationships is another question.

All in all this is an interesting strategy from BT. There is a potential benefit to the 170,000 BT business customers that already have an appropriate Total Broadband Hub as long as they can be assured creating an Openzone hub will not degrade their own connection.  It is also a rather interesting way for BT to extend its network of wifi hotspots without physically having to build new infrastructure.

It’ll be interesting to see what take up this initiative receives.

It appears that nearly half of all homeworkers (45%) find it difficult to separate work from family life, perhaps unsurprising bearing in mind their proximity.  The flexibility sought by nearly two thirds of home-based business owners (63%) could actually be a source of conflict when it comes to delineating work time and family time.

Bill Murphy, managing director at BT Business, suggests that:

There are now more than two million home-based businesses in the UK, yet almost half are struggling to separate their work and home lives – the very reason why many of them decided to work from home in the first place.

It seems to me, however, that building a business from home, throws the question of work-life balance into much starker relief than working from an office. 

For some the blurring of work and home life may actually be a good thing.  For others, like for many entrepreneurs before them, work will become life (at least for a period of time) and the proximity of family will become irrelevant.

In partnership with Cisco it has launched ‘BT Communications Complete’ which uses the former’s UC500 voice, data, video and wifi, IP phone system to give small to medium sized businesses a communications system which had previously been the preserve of much larger organisations.

BT claims the service will help small businesses reduce operating costs, allow staff to work more effectively together and improve customer service.  Similar claims are made for its ‘Business One Plan’ which introduces the ‘triple play’ (broadband, landline and mobile) to the SME market.

The backup and support built into both these offering could well save your business time, but cost savings are more difficult to identify.

Usually it pays to shop around, if you want the best deal and some purchasing departments would argue it’s not a good idea to consolidate with one supplier.  Comparisons, however, are difficult. 

BT is a little coy about pricing of its Communications Complete service, perhaps understandably because each business is going to have different needs.  However, I was able to glean that on average the service would cost less than a cup of coffee per employee, per day.

If you buy your coffee at Starbucks. you’d be looking at around £2.00 per day per employee.  That equates to a monthly cost of nearly £3,000 for the 48 local staff for whom the package is currently able to cater.  This, of course, is for the hardware and support alone, not the price of calls.

Although not necessarily focused on expenses, other web-based services aimed at helping SMEs handle accounts include Kash-Flow, Business IT Online and FreeAgent.

It’s an increasingly competitive space, which can only be a good thing for small business owners.  You will, of course, have to be happy to have your business’s financial data held by third parties.  These days that shouldn’t be a problem, but you ought to check out the terms and conditions of each service.

It’s also not clear to me how easy it is to migrate data between one online service and another should you wish to switch provider at some point down the line.  Again something worth checking, if you decide to sign up for any of these.

BT’s standard Web Expenses service allows unlimited expense claims to be entered and offers reporting facilities for managers.  Its premium service (£8.99 per month) offers a range of more advanced features, including the ability to upload credit card entries and allow different departments to feed their expenses information into a single central system.

These will include round table discussions, webinars, podcasts and advice clinics designed to help startups and other companies do better business and champion Britain’s small business community.

The week also expects to address a number of themes including the environment, flexible working, the web and reveal data from a survey on the state of the ‘SME nation’. 

It’s a little strange that this week should be timed just a matter of days ahead of Enterprise Week, but arguably is aimed at small businesses themselves, rather than the education sector, which some would say was Enterprise Week’s remit.