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Reuters blog archive
from Chrystia Freeland:
Business, taxes and responsibility
In recent months, people and their politicians around the world have been astonished to learn that big companies and billionaires will go to extraordinary lengths to pay lower taxes.
Thanks to the work of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, based in Washington, we have discovered that some of the most prominent public figures in the world have banked their fortunes in international tax havens, beyond the scrutiny of their national treasuries.
Meanwhile, Tom Bergin, my Reuters colleague, has become the scourge of the top U.S. multinationals by revealing their low effective tax rate in Britain. Mr. Bergin has found that between 1998 and 2012, Starbucks paid less than 9 million pounds, or about $14 million, in British taxes while registering sales of more than 3 billion pounds. According to statutory filings, Google made $18 billion in revenue in Britain from 2006 to 2011, and paid just $16 million in taxes.
Open the door to the top executives' suite and you will hear howls of rage over the backlash these revelations have provoked. There is, from the corporate point of view, something a little disingenuous happening here. After all, countries, states and cities have spent the past several decades openly competing to set the lowest corporate tax rates in an effort to attract business. The fact that multinationals would respond to these incentives and turbocharge them with some international tax arbitrage is about as shocking as the discovery of gambling in Casablanca.
from Breakingviews:
Google shooting blanks in smartphone patent wars
By Reynolds Holding
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Google is shooting blanks in the smartphone patent wars. Buying Motorola Mobility and its cache of inventions was meant to shield the search giant’s Android operating system from legal attack. But judges and regulators are defusing the patent arsenal, saying the underlying technology must be licensed on reasonable terms. While bad for Google shareholders, it’s a bonus for innovation.
from MediaFile:
Home is where the phone is
It hasn’t yet been six years since the start of the smartphone revolution and we've already become an "always on" culture. At least, that’s the temptation. Those who submit can be called The Immersives: checking e-mail, keeping tabs on Facebook "friends," debating on Twitter, snapping photos of food for Instagram. It would be rare if any of us didn’t have at least one toe dipped in the stream.
We are all Immersives sometime: We bury our faces in the small screen while we walk, or come dangerously close to driving blindly into traffic. We can't get through a meal without virtually leaving the table. We keep our phones on permanent silent to conceal the depth of our addiction. If we even momentarily lose track of our phone, we are as anxious as new parents whose toddler has dipped out of sight.
from Breakingviews:
Facebook super-app wants to live off Google
By Robert Cyran
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Facebook’s new super-app wants to live off Google. The social network’s Home software, unveiled on Thursday, sits on top of the Android smartphone operating system. That encourages people to use Facebook over rival services. Google built Android, but Mark Zuckerberg’s company plainly likes the idea of grabbing a piece of it.
from MediaFile:
What is Google doing?
A few years ago, web thinker Jeff Jarvis published an homage to the world's most successful Web search and advertising company titled "What Would Google Do?" These days, the question seems to be, "What is Google doing?"
Google won us over with a revolutionary approach to Web search that made its predecessors seem archaic. It quickly toppled Yahoo as the coolest company on the planet based solely on its efficient and fast way of finding everyone else's content. Now, though, Google is something entirely different.
from The Great Debate:
Social media life: What privacy?
It was almost quaint: Google’s recent apology for privacy violations. Granted, it came in the face of a lawsuit where the company got its hand slapped for “data-scooping,” a wonderful phrase that could be the slogan of our current lives. Google was found to have crossed the line with its Street View Project, where in addition to photographing houses and buildings along the world’s streets and avenues, the Googilians scooped up all manner of personal information from zillions of unencrypted wireless networks.
Really? I’m shocked. Not. Who doesn’t data scoop is my question?
I look at a bathing suit on line. For the next few weeks, whenever I open my laptop it pops right up. It’s like I am being stalked by a bathing suit. I vow to never ever succumb again to online shopping, a resolve that crumbles faster than my New Year’s resolutions.
from MediaFile:
Paying the piper for privacy
Three privacy stories caught my attention in the past week:
1. Google is paying a token $7 million fine for sniffing out private information as its roving Google Maps cars gathered images for Street View.
2. A new study has found that seemingly innocent disclosures on Facebook can be used to form highly accurate predictions about whether you are a genius, drug user or gay.
from Breakingviews:
Where did Apple’s missing market value go?
By Richard Beales
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Mr Market has slashed Apple’s market value by $260 billion in six months. Meanwhile, the combined worth of a wide group of smartphone and tablet rivals has added less than half that. If investors think Apple is fading, the competing Android complex could be worth far more - to someone.
from Stories I’d like to see:
America’s lobbying abroad, and following a wonder drug’s money trail
1. Find the story here:
Let’s begin this column with a quiz, one designed to test your story-generating talents. If the answer comes to you within 10 seconds, you, too, could be an editor or TV news producer. If you are an editor or producer and don’t see it instantly, you need better radar.
First, read the opening two sentences from a story that appeared in the Financial Times a few weeks ago:
from MediaFile:
Facebook’s search has been found
With "Graph Search," Facebook’s newsearch engine announced Tuesday, the world’s largest social network has finally begun to index a trove of Big Data that's been piling up for years. Even Facebook probably doesn't know what's been deposited in by its 1 billion members. Suddenly there is a way to find out.
For all its popularity, Facebook has lacked something that could be described as "purpose." For co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, sharing isn't a platitude ‑ it's world-altering. As he once said: "By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent." Yet Facebook is, for the most part, fun and games. It’s also, in the opinion of some, including me, a Faustian bargain that gives the company valuable information with which to make money, and its members the ability to do things they can do any number of other ways.
