Talk about double standards for business???

US auction site eBay has paid only £1.2m in tax in the UK, according to an investigation by the Sunday Times.

The newspaper said that its tax bill in 2010 comes despite eBay's UK subsidiaries generating sales of £800m.

The auction site - which also owns PayPal - responded that it "complies fully with all applicable tax laws". 

The report comes after coffee giant Starbucks was also accused of paying just £8.6m in corporation tax in the UK over 14 years.

According to the Sunday Times, eBay had sales of £789m during 2010 in the UK at its four British subsidiaries. Using its worldwide profit margin of 23%, it would have made a profit in the UK of £181m, leading to corporation tax owed of £51m.

Instead, it paid £1.2m, the report said.

Read the full article here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20022365

Clicknetworks invests in fibre optic & high performance virtual machine cluster

Clicknetworks has announced its plan to build an ultra high-speed fibre optic broadband network.

The investment in the new technology infrastructure comes just shortly after the company announced they were to move all of their client’s data to a high performance virtual machine cluster.

The virtual machine cluster is reported to run on a 2 terabyte iSCSI SAN custom built by the Clicknetworks Computer Engineering team.

“The high performance virtual machine cluster will enable higher availability and greater density for our managed data. This means our hosted websites will be faster and our client’s data will be faster to access as well as providing a faster and more reliable backup”, said Craig Smith Systems Architect for Clicknetworks.

Clicknetworks software development team are currently developing a number of cloud based applications where high loads and high demand are anticipated. It is hoped that the new investment in information technology will enable Clicknetworks to support that future demand as well as enable their business clients to capitalise and use a technology framework usually reserved for large corporations and scientific / educational institutions.

“If we take a look at the big players like Microsoft and Google as well as look at current industry trends and the popularity of many cutting edge online applications that are based on subscription services, it is clear to us that the future of IT exists in the cloud. Software as a service is something we are going to see become common place in the not too distant future”, said Andrew Beattie, Digital Strategist at Clicknetworks Ltd.