Monthly Archives: January 2021

Hot Business News Today

Government must help self-employed excluded due to 50% income rule

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Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
The government should act to help self-employed excluded from Covid support because more than 50% of their income comes from elsewhere.
This deliberate exclusion is unfair and disproportionately attacks women on modest incomes, says the influential Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
This is the second time the IFS has waded into the argument about the self-employed in as many days. Yesterday, the IFS published a report calling for the self-employed to pay more tax.
>See also: You should file your tax return by January 31, despite HMRC extension
Over a million self-employed people who have less than 50% of their income coming from self-employment have been excluded from the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS).
The IFS says that it is manifestly unfair that someone who declares profits of 51 per cent from self-employed income can claim the maximum, while those who claim 49 per cent of profits get nothing.
SEISS provides payments once per quarter worth 80 per cent of pre-pandemic profits up to a cap of £7,500 (per quarter) for eligible self-employed workers who have been adversely affected by the pandemic.
The scheme is expected to have cost £28bn by April 2021, making emergency Covid payments to at least

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How to grow your business with zero advertising budget

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Originally written by Jaclyn Crocker on Small Business
Since the explosion of social media at the beginning of this century, brands have become increasingly reliant on digital advertising strategies to drive growth. This has inevitably resulted in bigger brands with a bigger advertising budget having an unfair advantage over smaller companies with less cash to burn.
But the tide is turning.
According to a report by internet trend expert, Mary Meeker, cost-per-acquisition has increased by 50 per cent over the last three years alone and is certain to outpace the lifetime value of a customer for many brands in the years ahead. In addition, a new generation of customers is emerging who are far more sceptical than their predecessors and therefore much less receptive to traditional methods of customer acquisition (think social advertising and influencer promotions). Instead, they are looking for more meaning and purpose from the brands they buy from – trust and authenticity have overtaken the need for cut prices and convenience.
>See also: 5 tips to make your small business TikTok marketing a success
And the last year has only accelerated this shift. Businesses that have relied too heavily on a big advertising budget to fuel their growth have inevitably suffered. That’s

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We Helped Greece Build an AI System to Make Covid-19 Testing More Efficient. Here's What We Learned.

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Two data scientists built a machine learning system named Eva to help Greece safely reopen to nearly 80,000 tourists a day. The system, known as Eva, is nearly twice as efficient at detecting cases as random testing and it can predict spikes in other countries ten days before they show up in official case counts.

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