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...

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal , California’s former centrist Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was offered a cabinet position in Barack Obama ’s administration after he left office in January, 2011. WSJ’s Erica Orden notes that Schwarzenegger told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos during the 2008 presidential campaign that he was open to a position in a future Obama White House. In July 2008, on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Schwarzenegger was asked whether he’d consider an energy-related cabinet position with the Obama administration, were Barack Obama, then a candidate, to win the presidency. Mr. Schwarzenegger said he would, replying: “I’d take his call now, and I’d take his call when he’s president, anytime.” It is not clear what cabinet position that Schwarzenegger discussed with Obama administration officials. Politico reached out to the White House for comment but they did not immediately respond. h/t Wall Street Journal > >Follow Noa...

Google may be taking the ill-conceived Nexus Q back to the drawing board, but the Nexus 7 tablet has been quite a hit since it went on sale a few weeks ago. Since then, though, Google has faced a number of supply issues and the company even suspended sales of the 16GB for a few days to catch up with demand. The latest data from ad network Chitika shows how those supply issues have stalled the growth of Google’s first tablet – at least when measured by web traffic from Nexus 7 owners. Just a few weeks ago, Chitika reported that the Nexus tablet was on its way to surpass the Kindle Fire in its traffic rankings. By now, the company predicted, the Google tablet was supposed to be ahead of the Fire. Instead, its latest data shows that it’s still trailing Amazon’s tablet by quite a bit. While traffic from the Nexus 7 to Chitika’s network of member sites grew rapidly during the first few weeks after it went on sale, growth stalled over the last three weeks. Chitika reports its tablet data r...

After months of hype, it’s been pretty quiet around Pinterest for the last few weeks. According to the latest data we just received from Shareaholic, however, the social photo sharing site is still growing quickly, though judging from the company’s referral data, Pinterest’s growth has slowed down a bit since June. From May to June Pinterest’s referral traffic to Shareaholic’s network of about 200,000 sites grew by 43.7%. From June to July, it “only” increased by 15.97%. Even at this slower growth rate, Pinterest is still on track to surpass referral traffic from Yahoo in August. This, says Shareaholic, means Pinterest will soon be the fourth largest traffic source in the world. Today, Pinterest already drives more traffic to sites that use Shareaholic than Bing and Twitter and it’s only 0.10% away from overtaking Yahoo. Google, of course, remains the largest driver of traffic to the company’s member sites, followed by Facebook and – for the time being – Yahoo. As our own Sarah Perez...

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...

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More Velti has just released its mobile ad industry report for June. As usual, the mobile marketing company has chosen to highlight disparate factoids that it culled from the data — for example, it says that Israel is the leader in app engagement, with adults using apps for an average of 80 minutes per day. Sweden and Singapore are next on the list, while the United States is way behind, with only 38 minutes spent in apps on average. The report also looks at trends in eCPMs, i.e., the amount paid by advertisers for every thousand impressions. There’s a lot of talk about how those numbers are lower on mobile, but a...