Ah, Harry Potter. The boy wonder has captured the imaginations of children and adults alike for a decade. And, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows currently screening in cinemas across the UK, Smarta thought it would tune into the zeitgeist and pull out five sparkling and enchanting business lessons from the saga. Here's how Harry Potter and his magical mates can inspire and inform small business owners.

The UK manufacturing sector has seen its fair share of trials and tribulations. It used to be the crowning glory of our green and pleasant land. But it has been the red squirrel to the hulking grey of our financial services industry, which has grown in strength, mainly due to the model's minimal capital outlay and technological advantage. Over the last two decades, financial services have dominated the City and generated vast revenues for the UK. Outpaced and outmatched by this burgeoning sector, pundits predicted that our factories and production lines would simply waste away. Not so. A new survey reveals that, following the devastation wreaked upon financial bodies in the recession, UK manufacturing companies are fighting back.

Breastfeeding mothers might be given discreet areas to breastfeed and express breast milk by businesses, under new proposals from health secretary Andrew Lansley laid out in a whitepaper this week. But the suggestions are drawing very mixed reactions from business owners and the press, with reactions ranging from the outright sexist to the celebratory to concerns this will burden small businesses with extra costs.

Come on - you can't tell us there's not a flicker of a moment when you revert to being a seven-year-old kid upon the sight of snow. And with today's flurries whooshing around making England look like Iceland in wintertime, we can't help but squeal internally with whizzy-white-eyed glee.

To celebrate his 60^th birthday, Virgin founder Richard Branson is answering 60 questions from Virgin employees. Here are the first 31! Prepare to get inside the billionaire's mind as Branson answers each query with candour and humour.

Welcome to Mega Monday: the day touted by online retailers as one of the biggest and busiest in the run-up to Christmas, as pay day merrily meets the first serious bit of Christmas shopping online.

There are some pretty hefty numbers forecasted for today, so we thought we'd round them up along with the broader figures predicted for Christmas business 2010, and see how retail and spending trends have changed since last year (in brief: more and more people are shopping online):

Finance ministers have agreed to a bailout worth €85bn (£72m) for the beleaguered Irish economy. The terms of the bailout were set last night at a European Union finance ministers' meeting in Brussels.

Shaa Wasmund, founder of Smarta, is a social media advocate. But you can't control the feedback your business receives on platforms like Twitter. Wasmund warns against taking criticism too much to heart. After all, an angry customer is always more likely to write about their experience than a happy one. Here's how to manage bad press.

Everyone has grrrrrrr moments. And it's no bad thing to get them off your chest - sometimes we all need a good rant. So for a full month, we're asking all of you who follow us on Twitter to tell us what you need to let off steam about, using the Twitter hastag #letoffsteam. (Not on Twitter? See below!)

Andrew Ward is the founder of 3D Horror-Fi, a unique audio production house that creates '3D' recordings of horror stories. The first five releases have already gone down a storm with the digital generation. Here's Ward's 60-second pitch.