The official forecast for growth in the UK economy this year has been halved. The cuts were announced at the start of George Osborne's Budget speech this week, in which he blamed the cuts on lower-than-expected exports. Not an announcement to fill UK businesses or employees with the joys of Spring, if indeed Spring ever arrives! When the economy is stagnant and budgets are tight it is very difficult for employers not to look at cutting headcounts, freezing pay or reducing investment in training.

First serious discussions about the possibility of Britain departing the EU arose in early December 2012. By the end of the month, the debate had become more intense. After pointed comments from Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, there appears support for a referendum whereby residents of the UK will choose to stay in the EU or opt to bail out of the organization.

HTC has revealed that it will finally drop the frankly stupid “Quietly Brilliant” tagline it has been using for the past few years, the WSJ reports, with company marketing chief Benjamin Ho saying they “haven’t been loud enough” with marketing to date. The first fruits of that change in strategy are already apparent, with HTC handing out snacks at the Galaxy S4 launch event in NYC, and the use of the hashtag #theNextBigFlop to directly take down the S4 on Twitter.

If you haven't yet begun to find ways to save more money and improve your finances, now is certainly the time to spring into action. Gas prices are on the rise, your healthcare expenses could go up in the near future, and there could be more tax increases on the horizon. Therefore, it's important to save however, whenever you can.

For the next 26 days, I will be posting some useful tools and resources that I regularly use as a business support service professional. Naturally we will start with the "A's" and if you have any fantastic links that you'd like to share, please get in touch:

1. Adobe Creative Cloud: this is brilliant. Sign up for a free account and you can download one piece of software for a 30 day trial.

Money Management Begins at Home

Good money management skills begin at home at can surprisingly start with children as young as five years old. Putting a few coins in a piggybank is a time-honored budgeting technique that still appeals to many Moms. A deeper understanding of budgeting and the value of saving money takes longer to learn, however, and should be an important part of every parent’s goal to ensure their children’s financial security.

 But money can buy bacon and that makes me very happy!

As a mechanism for payment, the credit card remains just as hardy as ever. It has so far defied the threat of mobile phones, and less plausibly, QR codes, among many other forms of payment.

One YC-backed startup is betting that fingerprints and other forms of biometric identification may be the payment method of the future though. Called PayTango, they’re partnering with local universities to offer a quick and easy way for students to use their fingerprints to pay instead of credit cards.

LONDON - At 17, he's a tech whiz, he's rich — and he can even offer some advice on how to raise your kids.

Teenage programmer Nick D'Aloisio's decision to sell his news application Summly to Yahoo for what's rumoured to be a massive payout has turned him into a media sensation. The sale caps a short but successful career at Apple Inc.'s vast app store, where hundreds of thousands of pieces of software compete for the attention of smartphone and tablet users.