THE LOCAL

Making changes to your business network can be a headache, to put it mildly. Take adding a new branch office, retail outlet or restaurant expansion. Every growing business is looking to ensure top productivity and communication across its divisions, whether they are across the street or on the other side of the world. But making that connectivity happen can quickly become complicated and expensive — especially when the sites are remote and involve various service providers. It’s little wonder why so many Canadian businesses are turning to a new generation of cloud-based network technology for the solution. Known as SD-WAN (short for software-defined wide area network), the technology is already being embraced by Canadian organizations, with an estimated 70 per cent of businesses using or planning to use SD-WAN within two years, according to IDC Canada. So just what is this new networking solution, and what makes it so different from what we’ve been used to? The k...

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple, which had long deferred paying taxes on its foreign earnings and had become synonymous with hoarding money overseas, unveiled plans on Wednesday that would bring back the vast majority of the $252 billion in cash that it held abroad and said it would make a sizable investment in the United States. With the moves, Apple took advantage of the new tax code that President Trump signed into law last month. A provision allows for a one-time repatriation of corporate cash held abroad at a lower tax rate than what would have been paid under the previous tax plan. Apple, which has 94 percent of its total cash of $269 billion outside the United States, said it would make a one-time tax payment of $38 billion on the repatriated cash. For years, Apple had said it would not bring its foreign earnings back to the United States until the corporate tax code changed, because such a move would be too costly. Now Apple’s bet to hold back on paying such taxes...

S outh Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Upbit disclosed its amount of daily transactions on January 16 for the first time. Coin Market Cap, arguably the most prominent global index of cryptocurrency prices, said that Upbit ranked first in the world in terms of 24-hour trading volumes with 4.92 trillion won (US$4.62 billion), according to the data received from Upbit. As another domestic cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb also took third place, South Korea’s speculative investment in digital currency was proved with the figures. Upbit hasn’t been officially disclosing its trading volumes except for the announcement in December last year that the amount of its maximum daily transactions and its average daily transactions surpassed 10 trillion won (US$9.39 billion) and 5 trillion won (US$4.7 billion) based on its own aggregates. Established in October last year, Upbit recently completed its work for service optimization and was planning to begin registration of i...

Small business remains the backbone of the economy. It is a hugely scattered sector that includes everything from the self-employed man with a van, to the software developer who has a few clients, all the way to the food-exporting firm that might be worried about Brexit. When things are going well for small business, they are often going well for the economy as a whole. As small business owners look towards, 2018 they are in good form. The economy is growing at a steady clip. People have more money in their pockets and they appear to be spending it. The primary driver of this good news is that more people are at work. More working customers for small business means better prices and better business. The numbers at work in the third quarter of last year had increased by another 48,000 compared to the previous year and people employed is now pretty much right back where it was at the height of the boom in 2007 at around 2.2 million. But business is never straightforward and there ...