Phew! It's been a big month for new celebrity businesses. Kate Moss is set to pursue the simple life, running a B&B in Cornwall, Jamie Oliver's launching an eatery exclusively for carnivores and Madonna, the Queen of pop, is founding a fitness empire.

Bill Morrow is the founder of Angels Den, which connects angel investors with businesses.

Ask any entrepreneur why they decided to invest such a huge chunk of their lives setting up their own business, when they could have been relaxing in a relatively easy-going middle management position for Nameless PLC, and they will know with crystal clarity the answer to your question. Whether or not they'd be prepared to tell you is another matter entirely, but I can assure you they'll know. Starting your own business is exciting, it's liberating, it's terrifying, it's many things, but it's certainly not forgettable.

There are some real corkers in the Smarta viral chart this week. From a little Wayne Rooney bashing to a mystery time traveller in Charlie Chaplin's 1928 film The Circus, there's plenty of brain fodder and marketing inspiration for small businesses wanting to create their own viral campaigns. Enjoy!

Almost everyone who has heard of Lord Sugar knows that he started out selling to a rag-and-bone man and found his early returns on car aerials before moving up the technological pecking order to computers. At 63, TV's favourite entrepreneur is still putting in the leg-work. This week he hot-footed it around London, with Smarta in attendance, promoting his memoir What You See Is What You Get.

Nathan has been listed in the Shell Livewire Hot 40 2010 and was voted Most Enterprising Student in Central England in 2007. In the first of two blogs for Smarta, he explains how he got If? Works up and running.

I'm a 24-year-old industrial designer and entrepreneur from a small mining town called Dinnington, in South Yorkshire. I graduated in 2008 with a first class industrial design degree at Sheffield Hallam University, and took advantage of the great support available from the university's enterprise centre to set up my own business, If? Works Limited, which I had dreamed of doing from a young age.

In honour of All Hallows, Smarta has blown the dust off its Ouija board to contact the land of the dead. Today, we commune with the dearly departed soul of the great entrepreneur, filmmaker and inventor Howard Hughes. Here's what the glass spelled out...

Melissa, Melissa, can't shut up her kisser, the others rightly diss her, but you'd be gutted to miss her - in last night's episode if for some reason you happened not to see The Apprentice. (If that's the case, what on earth were you doing? Lord Sugar makes Wednesday nights worth staying in for).

At Smarta, we know that all you need to start a business is a mobile phone, a laptop and an internet connection. But when the long hours start to take their toll, and your productivity levels start to dip, here are our top five gadgets to help you make it through the day.

Apprentice winner Lee McQueen gives us his verdict on last night's record-breaking episode of The Apprentice.

Last night's Apprentice was a really good one, and I think it'll be a kind of turning point of the series because it set the bar. I was really impressed with both results, it was a fantastic effort from both of them. It's a shame Jamie's team had to lose with £76,000. The £122,000 from the other team must have been the investment bankers in the team!

Great news for those of you with staff - 56% of workers would happily earn 10% less if it meant they could work flexibly, a report from Cisco has found.