Pie brand MyPy and biscuit brand Special Stars have been trademarked by the programme’s creators in preparation for bringing them to market.

The Apprentice is produced by Talkback Thames, a division of Fremantle Media, which also makes The X-Factor and Never Mind the Buzzcocks and stars Lord Sugar.

MyPy, a restaurant chain that focused on British ingredients, was invented by series winner Tom Pellereau and runner-up Helen Louise Milligan.

Fans of the The Apprentice set up a MyPy Facebook group, calling on the show’s producers or outside investors to turn the fast food pie restaurant idea into reality.

Of course, these are not the only strategies in existence for making money on the internet, but they are all in widespread use by a range of successful web enterprises, and have been shown to work. As such, they should provide a good basis for you to start thinking about how your own business can monetise its products and services, taking into account the unique factors mvolved in your market.

1. Cross-selling model
Gillette does this very well, selling its razors at a (relatively) affordable price, but making the real money on the blades, which have to be replaced.

2. Traffic volume/ monetising eyeballs model
This is something Facebook has learned to do extremely well, offering us its platform to share data, photos and so on in exchange for a captive audience for advertisers.

3. Consultancy model
This is where your ‘product’ is your time and your expertise, sold on an hourly or daily rate. A website here is used primarily as a portfolio/brochure from which to drive business.

4. Peer-to-peer market model
The model used by firms such as eBay, which brokers buyers and sellers and takes a cut from transactions. There’s also the intermediary model, used by the likes of MoneySupermarket, which aggregates data to drive a high audience (very appealing to advertisers).

“This approach marks a change and hardening attitude. Currently, the tax authorities typically scrutinise an organisation’s tax affairs and record keeping if they believe it has filed an inaccurate tax return and is therefore paying too little tax. But this new programme means inspectors will be able to focus on current year records before a tax return is even submitted,” said Richard Mannion, national tax director at Smith & Williamson, the accountancy and financial services group.

He continued: “HMRC will literally be able to walk into any business and demand to see their invoices, receipts, PAYE and VAT records and so on. And remember, they can go back six years in the case of a business that has been around that long.”

“The programme will apply to both new and established businesses and so it will be of concern to millions of businesses up and down the country.”

To encourage people to get their records in order, HMRC has issued a range of advisory information which is available at www.hmrc.gov.uk

“Business owners should take these warnings seriously. If they don’t keep good records, they may be unable to substantiate tax returns and so would have difficulty in proving their figures are correct, should HMRC take issue with them.”

As a basic minimum, business people need to be organised and methodical in their record keeping.

Top five tips include:

• Time: keep records going back at least six years.
• What to keep: invoices, bank statements, paying in books, details of purchases, expense details and so on.
• Personal vs. business: anyone who makes a claim for the use of assets which they use personally as well as for the business – a car being a typical example – must be scrupulous in allocating personal and business useage and have the necessary supporting paperwork to back up their claim.
• Be regular: keep on top of your expenses and record keeping. This will make it easier and more accurate. Also, HMRC is more likely to believe contemporaneous records.
• Avoid estimates: if you have to estimate an amount, make sure you can provide suitable evidence.

At a press event Thursday at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and SVP of product Deep Nishar discussed the company’s new product strategy and revealed a few new products.

Weiner says that the company has three central goals as part of its quest to deliver value to its membership. First, LinkedIn wants to be the professional profile of record. Second, the company wants to be the primary source for professional insights. Finally, LinkedIn wants to be ubiquitous in the workplace.

SVP of product Nishar then took the stage to explain that vast amounts of business information pass through LinkedIn’s servers, things like profile views, connections, polls, sharing stats and more. The challenge is finding a way to synthesize and deliver this information in a way that gives its users actionable business data.

To start the event, the business network demoed two previously launched products: LinkedIn Skills and LinkedIn InMaps.

Nishar says that products like Skills and InMaps provide its users unparalleled business insights, but that users have to dig into these products for the relevant data and insights. The company wants to take things a step further by delivering that data to its users’ fingertips.

LinkedIn says that two of its products fit into this model: the already-launched LinkedIn Signal and the new LinkedIn Today product.

LinkedIn Today is a professional news product that aggregates and delivers a personalized news experience to each user. Product manager Liz Walker says that it chooses stories based on what stories a user’s network is sharing.

It’s similar to apps like Paper.li in terms of design and functionality. Today provides different lenses for checking out top news in not just a user’s network, but in entire industries. For example, users can check out the hot stories in marketing and advertising, private equity or politics. The company says it’s a quick way for busy business users to get the top stories of the day.

LinkedIn also released a mobile version of LinkedIn Today that gives users the ability to check top stories within their network on the fly.

Forbes has released the 25th edition of its rich-beyond-belief list. The World’s Billionaires 2011 broke two records: total number of members (1,210) and combined wealth ($4.5 trillion). Facebook helped.

Six of the company’s founders and investors made the annual list this year; that’s one billionaire for each of Facebook’s 100 million users. Four of them only just became billionaires, according to Forbes.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg moved from number 212 with an estimated worth of $4 billion in 2010 to number 52 with a wealth of $13.5 billion. Zuckerberg’s fortune exploded 238 percent over the last year, making him the largest percentage gainer in the US. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel moved from 828 and an estimated worth of $1.2 billion to 833 and $1.5 billion (no, that’s not a typo: although his wealth grew, his rank decreased as others grew faster than him). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook in 2004.

Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz ($2.7 billion) and Eduardo Saverin ($1.6 billion) joined the ranks of the richest. 26-year-old Moskovitz is actually the youngest billionaire on the Forbes list, just 8 days younger than the Facebook CEO. He was Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard, Facebook’s third employee, and left Facebook in 2008 to start Asana. Saverin was meanwhile sued by Facebook for allegedly interfering with business and insisting on keeping a 30 percent stake. Saverin countersued, the two settled, and he got a 5 percent stake as well as a co-founder bio on Facebook’s site. He is now living in Singapore, and recently invested in Qwiki.

Facebook investors Sean Parker ($1.6 billion) and Yuri Milner ($1.0 billion) also joined up this year. Parker, Facebook’s former president and Napster co-founder, has a stake of just under 3 percent in the social network after joining the company in 2004. Separately, he has returned to his roots by investing in Spotify. Using DST Global, a private fund that invests in global Internet companies, Milner paid $200 million in 2009 for a stake in Facebook. The value of this initial investment has jumped an estimated five-fold.

Anyone want to take a gander as to how many billionaires will be on next year’s list?

The feature, which is supported across 38 different languages, lets users preview a website before making the decision to click on a link. By selecting a magnifying glass icon next to a search result, users can browse the websites that appear on the first page of results. Tapping the page preview will open up the respective link.

We think that Google’s mobile implementation of Instant Previews is elegant. It’s also quite snappy — at least on my iPhone 4. Instant Previews will often showcase the mobile version of a web page, which is a nice touch.

When thinking about the overall utility for this type of feature, the best usage scenarios are probably times when users have limited bandwidth. Having said that, we do question how useful this feature will be for most users, because when Googling on the go, most users are just as likely to visit a page, wait a few seconds and then return to search results if the page isn’t appropriate. In other words, it can take more time to browse through the instant preview options than it can to just visit a few pages.

Consumers can pay for the movies using Facebook Credits, a virtual currency so far used mainly in social games on the site, according to Warner Bros, a unit of Time Warner Inc, on Tuesday.

Facebook, which makes money mostly through online advertising, takes 30 percent of the revenue from sales by third parties on the website using Credits.

The service will initially be available in the United States, the company said.

The streaming of full-length Hollywood films on Facebook creates a new role for the 500-million-plus member social network, which has grown into one of the most powerful Web players by making it easy to share photos, videos and other content with friends.

In a note to investors on Tuesday, Goldman Sachs analyst Ingrid Chung said Facebook represents a long-term threat to online rental service Netflix Inc that caught Wall Street investors by surprise.

“The ‘wisdom of friends’ could be a bigger driver of movie viewership than the ‘wisdom of crowds,’” wrote Chung.

However, Lazard Capital Markets analyst Barton Crockett said in a note to investors that online pay-per-view services have not proved as popular as subscription-based movie services, and noted that the Warner Bros offering is a “far cry” from Facebook launching a subscription service.

Shares of Apple Inc, which offers pay-per-view movies online, rose 0.1 percent to $355.76. Amazon.com Inc, which also rents movies online, fell 1.3 percent to $166.89.

It was not immediately clear whether other movie studios were planning similar projects with Facebook.

The first movie available on the Warner Bros Entertainment page on Facebook is “The Dark Knight”. Additional titles will be available for rental or purchase in the coming months.

Rentals cost 30 Facebook Credits, or $3, for 48 hours, and viewers can pause and restart a movie whenever they log back in.

One person close to the Warner-Facebook project told Reuters that it was not a partnership, but rather, a Facebook application that Warner developed on its own, using the website’s open payment and technology standards.

More than 400 games and applications use Facebook Credits, the company said in an emailed statement on Tuesday. “We’re open to developers and partners that want to experiment using credits in new and interesting ways, and we look forward to seeing what they come up with.”

Net traffic into and out of the country had been intermittent during recent protests but the cut coincided with a push to oust rebels.

During the early days of the rebellion in Libya, net access was restricted but in early March net traffic started to pick up in areas no longer under the control of Colonel Gaddafi’s government.

Graphs of net activity maintained by Google show a steady rise in traffic to its sites throughout this week. In particular, Libyans were making heavy use of YouTube to post images of the conflict.

This changed late in the evening of 3 March when net traffic stopped flowing into and out of the troubled nation.

Rik Ferguson, senior security advisor at Trend Micro, said the approach to cutting net links was different to that taken by Egypt.

While all routers reported that lines to Libya were live, any traffic sent was not reaching its destination and was probably being “blackholed”, said Mr Ferguson.

Attempts to trace the routes that traffic could take into the country ended a hop short of official Libyan net space, said Mr Ferguson.

This meant that not only was Libya cut off from the net, but those inside the country would not be able to send messages or browse sites either.

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