Why girls love pink and boys prefer blue… US small business job engine… New site to swap your stuff… Padlock your flashdrive…

• Why girls love pink and boys prefer blue
• US small businesses job engine
• New site to swap your stuff
• Padlock your flashdrive

Why girls love pink and boys prefer blue

Ever wondered why so many girls want everything – clothes, rooms, toys, bedclothes – in pink? It could be in the genes. A new study suggests that girls’ preference for pink and boys for blue is genetically programmed, not learned.

The different preferences are innate and occur across cultures, according to British researchers who studied the colour preferences of 208 young adults: 171 Britons and 37 mainland Chinese. The Australian reports that gender differences were so strong in the research that the researchers could pick gender by colour preferences.

The most popular colour by far was blue. After that, females reported a preference for the red end of the red-green axis, which makes pinks and lilacs, their preferred colours compared with others.

US small business job engine

Almost all new American jobs are being created in small businesses. New figures from the US Government Small Business Administration reported in Inc.com show 97% of all new jobs (1.6 million jobs) in 2003-04 were in firms with fewer than 20 employees; 90% of all businesses are small businesses in the US.

New site to swap your stuff

A new site has opened that allows you to swap stuff online instead of buying and selling, according to Mashable.

YouSwop is a new social media website, currently in beta, for bartering stuff you have lying around the house.

How does it work? When you login you get five YouSwop credits, and more when you invite friends to the site. The credits allow you to buy a listing, in which you post an item to swap. People can then bid for it with their own goods for exchange.

You can charge for shipping costs, but because YouSwop is looking to build an open community for bartering, it is discouraged. That’s all right if you’re in the US, not so good if you’re in Australia.

Padlock your flashdrive

A lot of business people use flash drives – small information storage devices that have mostly replaced floppy disks – to back up data saved on the laptop or bring information to meetings or negotiations.

The problem is, what if you lose the pesky little thing – and a big chunk of confidential business information along with it?

Well, according to ohgizmo, a new flashdrive called the Flash Padlock has that problem covered. It has a five-button physical lock on the front. Once you’ve set the code, every time you pull the flashdrive out of your computer it automatically locks, preventing it from being accessed by any unauthorised users.

Best of all, because it’s a physical lock it’s not the sort of thing a tricky hacker could get around – although a clever locksmith might be another matter.

Quote of the day

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

TS Eliot