Round-up: Google helps SMEs with web presence

Markets rise on central banks' action, Google helps SMEs, and Goldman Sachs closes the jewel in the hedge fund world's crown - our round-up of the news from the nationals.

The UK arm of Google has launched a new trial scheme offering small businesses advice and support to increase their online potential.

Some 1,500 firms in Merseyside will be taught how to 'build a website in 15 minutes' and will benefit from all other sorts of free one-on-one digital support for a trial period of three months. If successful, the scheme may be rolled out to other parts of the UK, the Daily Mail reports. MORE

Markets rose sharply after central banks launched co-ordinated action to ease the European banking crisis in a throwback to the height of the 2008 funding crisis.

The European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan announced measures to improve dollar liquidity among struggling European banks, the Telegraph reports. MORE

The UK economy will grow by just 1.1% this year, the European Union forecast last night, and euro zone growth will grind to a halt later this year. The European Commission cut the UK's annual growth rate prediction from 1.7% and said the sovereign debt crisis will hit household and business spending.

But it said stronger-than-expected growth in the first half of the year meant that growth across the euro zone would still be 1.6 per cent for the whole of 2011, the Daily Mail reports. MORE

Goldman Sachs Group Inc is shuttering its $1.6bn Global Alpha hedge fund that relies on computer-driven trading strategies after the portfolio rang up a hefty loss this year. The fund that had been the crown jewel of its quantitative trading business, according to Reuters. MORE