Business

Google has about 1,200 employees in England and made £395 million in revenue there last year (that’s just under $620 million). It did, however, only pay £6 million in taxes in England last year. Unsurprisingly, that’s not sitting well with a number of British politicians and according to The Independent, Google could face a more formal investigation into its tax schemes by next spring. Google bases its international operations in Ireland, where corporations pay a tax rate of just 12.5%. Using a legal tax loophole called “Double Irish,” the company can move a large chunk of its UK profits to Ireland and then Bermuda. There, of course, the company pays even less tax. According to the Independent, Google’s Irish subsidiary basically employes Google UK as an agent. Because of this, Google’s UK revenue goes straight to Ireland. The Irish headquarter then pays Google UK a 10% fee and, “once costs have been deducted,” that’s all Google UK pays taxes on. It’s worth noting that the £6 million...

Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch. Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology. Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University... ? Learn More Investors demand more revenue from Facebook, and Sheryl’s got just the APIs to give it to them. Over the last two days, three major ads tech partners have revamped their products with recently released Facebook APIs that allow brands to track and optimize for on-site conversions including app installs, buy home page ads and logout page takeovers, and target ads specifically to mobile. The new capabilities in tools from Buddy Media, Nanigans, and BLiNQ Media (who just updated today) will attract ad dollars from app developers, huge brands, and local businesses. That...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More Brightcove announced its first acquisition as a public company today, with plans to acquire cloud encoding startup Zencoder for $30 million. And while the purchase will add a small amount of incremental revenue, the bigger strategic bet for Brightcove could be around making its video offerings more flexible and extensible, and hooking developers with more of a freemium business model. First of all, Brightcove’s Zencoder purchase marks a huge opportunity to capture part of a fast-growing segment of the online video market. According to Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire, Frost and Sullivan estimates the market is worth $264 million today, and will grow to $630 million by 2017. For this year and next, the actual impact will be pretty small: Brightcove estimated that Zen...

Google’s Nexus 7 tablet is off to such a good start that Google can’t keep up with demand for the 16GB model. The company hasn’t released any sales data yet, so it’s hard to gauge whether Google is selling out because it just grossly underestimated demand and didn’t produce anywhere close to enough devices, or whether the Nexus 7 is really selling at unprecedented levels (for an Android tablet, that is). To get a better grip on how well the Nexus is doing after just over a week on the market, the folks at ad networks Chitika provided us with some data about what they are seeing on their network. According to Chitika’s engineers, the Nexus 7 is posting “impressive usage figures” across the company’s network. It currently accounts for 0.3 impressions for every 100 iPad impressions. That doesn’t sound like much, but the Nexus is actually on track to quickly catching up with other popular Android tablets like the Kindle Fire and Samsung Galaxy Tab. As usual, it’s important to note that t...

Researchers are developing a sense of touch, at least, a sense of touch for robotic machinery. A group of 13 researchers are working on an international project to develop an artificial finger with a sense of touch. The finger would be directly connected to the nervous system, the researchers said. It would contain sensors on its surface in the same numbers as our fingers do. The sensors translate pressure and mechanical movement into an electronic code. This would then decoded by the wearers brain, once they were trained to interpret the signals. "Compared to the hand prostheses which are currently on the market, an integrated sense of touch would be a major improvement. It would be a truly modern and biometric device which would give the patient the feeling as if it belonged to his own body," says Dr. Lucia Beccai from the Centre for Micro-Robotics at the Italian Institute for Technology. The finger would be important for people who have lost fingers or hands. The prototy...