Home What's Brewing? Wa Tech’s Tea Party, Caffeinated News

Wa Tech’s Tea Party, Caffeinated News

If you had to choose, would you take .3% sales tax increase across the board and .25% increase in B&O or sales tax on custom software? So writes Washington Technology’a Governmental Affairs advisor Lew McMurran in an alert to area software businesses.

Last week the WA state House of Representatives past a massive tax increase, specifically targeting custom software as well as other computer related services.

Without any input from industry, the House passed a version of Senate Bill 6143 that includes a new tax on custom software development—a fundamental shift in tax policy that could lead to job losses, business closures and new taxes on other professional services.

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There are over 2,500 custom software businesses in Wa. state and most of these are small companies—and many are independent and freelance consultants. These companies and their employees already pay over $150 million in state and local taxes and are held up as the kind of innovation businesses we want to encourage in Washington,” cites WTIA.

The state Senate Bill increased the sales tax by .3 percent and the B&O tax on services from 1.5 % to 1.75%. The Senate bill also contains provisions on “tax avoidance”, a new concept in law that will surely be litigated.

The WTIA urges you to contact your state representatives and senator ASAP to protest the sales tax on custom software. A special session is on the docket for this week so the issue is still alive. Action Alert. [24×7]

Evri Merges Semantic Search Skills with Radar Networks
Seattle’s Evri.com and RadarNetwork’s Twine.com are joining forces. Twine is an online service for intelligently finding, organizing and sharing information with people in your personal network. Evri has been focusing more on filtering the realtime Web and then creating a semantic index of those pages based on matching similar content. One of the linchpins of the deal was the promise of combining Evri’s realtime filtering with Radar Net’s T2, an ambitious project to create a semantic index of the Web. With the acquisition of Twine, Evri gains a talented team with proven momentum in semantic search and content discovery. [24×7]

Other Caffeinated Brews:

Classmates.com to pay up to $9.5m to settle suit over phantom friends.

Redfin tries SmartPhone MLS App for house-hunting season. <http://bit.ly/a0rwwL>

Alaska Airlines announces Wi-Fi connectivity by end of year. Aircell Gogo Internet service wins. $4.95 base price per flight.

Large Seattle Law Firm seeks to hire Social Media Rising Star <http://bit.ly/9pzL67>

Get more info in the Seattle24x7 blog

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