Articles about Money

Almost half of all SMBs in the UK (49 percent) have lost money in the digital tax submission process, signaling that there is still a lot more work to be done before the Make Tax Digital initiative is completed successfully.

This is according to a new report by cloud accountancy software Pandle, which surveyed 1,000 UK SMBs. The report says that SMBs lost money despite feeling well-informed on the recent changes to the system.

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Toshiba has filed its delayed financial results, warning that its survival is at stake.

The tech and construction company has reported a loss of $4.8bn (£3.84bn) for the period between April and December. However, these results have not been confirmed by the company’s auditors.

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In creating a world that doesn’t break down, a huge $20B opportunity is on the table for the process industry to address. Astute manufacturers should focus on reducing unplanned downtime and increasing asset utilization, as both processes represent the biggest opportunities for financial improvement in production operations.

Albert Einstein could well be alluding to smart manufacturing when he said: "If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes."

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Worldwide IT spending will jump another 1.4 percent this year, according to a new report by Gartner. The report says IT spending is expected to hit $3.5 trillion this year. A quarter before, the increase was 2.7 percent, but the difference occurred mostly due to the strengthening of the US dollar.

"The strong US dollar has cut $67 billion out of our 2017 IT spending forecast," says John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. "We expect these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of US-based multinational IT vendors through 2017."

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Transactions are the foundation of business, but too often in our line of work we see payments treated as an afterthought.

As a consumer, we’ve all gone through an online checkout only to find they don’t take our card or our preferred mobile wallet, spotted a product online and struggled to find a place we can buy it, had to leave an app, or, worse still, download one to buy something, or landed on a confusing looking checkout page that looks completely different to the rest of the website.

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"What leads you to believe that Bitcoin will top £3K in 2017?" The answer does not lie in an analysis of macro-economic or monetary theory but in a more interesting understanding of human behavior. An understanding of human behavior and motivation, similar to that which lead Steve Jobs to develop the products he did and the digital marketing system of today. But first, let’s rewind.

Six months ago, before the Brexit vote, when the world seemed a safe and steady place, I put forward the theory that Bitcoin would surpass gold as the safe haven currency. While I pondered this theory, I realized that given the right conditions digital currencies can only trend up in value. The date was late April 2016, I had just been paid, so I went online and spent all that month’s wages on Bitcoins. I'm not a gambler and I’ve never invested in shares. But this was a sure thing.

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There are almost two million small and medium-sized businesses in the UK that don’t own a website, and combined they’re losing £343 billion every year.

This is according to new research by Approved Index, which claims SMEs without websites (a total of 1.98 million of them) are missing out on £173,769 per business, per year.

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IT modernization is essential to addressing the needs of modern digital businesses, according to a new report by Avanade. The report is based on a poll of 800 IT decision makers in organizations scattered all over the world.

On average, IT decision makers believe that by modernizing IT, they could boost their company’s revenue by as much as 14 percent. That’s almost $1 billion a year, Avanade says.

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As an observer of the Bitcoin market as long as this original cryptocurrency has existed, it never made much sense to me from an investment perspective. Bitcoin prices were too volatile and the volatility seemed too random. Volatility can be a good thing for traders, mind you, but only if you think you have an idea why the price goes up and down the way it does. Otherwise it is just a good way to lose all your money. But a couple of recent events have changed my view of Bitcoin. I now think I can explain its volatility and predict it well enough for profitable trading. And the best part is that it takes no rocket science at all. Your mother (and mine) can make a living trading Bitcoins.

For those who don’t know, Bitcoin is a stateless currency based on blockchain calculations. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins and only 16-odd million of those have so far been "mined." The present value of all mined Bitcoins is around $18 billion, which is amazing if you realize they came from nowhere and have no intrinsic value.

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Organizations in the UK have had a total of three days of Internet outages in 2016 each, according to a new report by Beaming. The UK economy lost £7 billion because of it, while companies lost productivity and had to cover for extra overtime.

More than 75 percent of companies polled for the report say they experienced at least one connectivity failure that stopped them from accessing crucial services. In 2016, on average, a company suffered four outages, waiting six hours for each one to be fixed.

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If you are a developer looking to earn some serious cash, you might want to consider becoming a machine learning specialist. According to a new report by Stack Overflow, entitled "Developer Hiring Landscape Report," machine learning specialists earn 24 percent more than what’s the average among developers on the British Isles.

That's £56,851 a year.

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Thousands of Alexa developers can now build and host most Alexa skills for free using Amazon Web Services (AWS), thanks to a newly released Amazon program.

Previously, developers have had at their disposal the AWS Free Tier, offering a million AWS Lambda requests and a total of 750 hours of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) -- monthly, for free. However, exceeding these limits also meant monthly fees.

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This year, the cyber-security focus is shifting from prevention only, into detection and response territory. This is according to a new Gartner report, which also says cyber-security spending will hit the $90 billion mark this year.

That’s actually a 7.6 percent increase year-on-year. Spending will keep on growing, Gartner says, up to $113 billion in 2020.

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Security researchers can make a lot of money by reporting bugs to software and hardware vendors. Microsoft, for instance, pays up to $15,000 for vulnerabilities in Office Insider, while Intel, through its first bug bounty program, takes things up a notch with a top reward of $30,000.

Intel's first bug bounty program was announced on HackerOne, and targets firmware, software and hardware products. Hardware vulnerabilities have the highest top reward, followed by firmware and then software.

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Microsoft wants to make Office more secure, so it has announced a bug bounty program for Office Insiders to catch vulnerabilities before shipping a public release.

The bug bounty program targets the Windows version of Office on the Slow ring and features rewards of up to $15,000, but for "certain submissions" -- presumably highly-critical security holes -- the software giant says that researchers can expected to be paid more.

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