Thanks for Visiting Us @ WPC 2009

Thanks to everyone who visited our booth at the expo in New Orleans at the Microsoft World Partner Conference 2009. We had a great time and met a lot of great people. Non-stop demos migrating Google Apps and Gmail to Exchange Online with MigrationWiz at our booth.

Retail Sales Tax or Not, That Is The Question

Washington State recently introduced taxation of digital goods and services. It's so new that even though it takes effect on July 26 (in 5 days), the Department of Revenue can't give you any guidelines on if it applies to you or not.

Now, you're probably just saying "why don't you just charge sales tax for everything?" That was the same question I asked them, and they told me that if I charge sales tax incorrectly to end-users, they can request that their sales tax be refunded to them even if we remit all of it to the state.

So let me get this straight, the Department of Revenue can't give proper guidance on charging sales tax to a rule that will take effect in 5 days and I'm penalized if I collect sales tax for everything and remit them all to the state. Seems like I can't win this one.

This really doesn't make sense for products that we produce. We are in the business of automating manual processes and streamlining them, which allow us to past the cost savings to our users. "Manual" processes are considered services and don't get charged sales tax, so why should a digital one have to charge sales tax?

I guess this is the states answer to the rising deficit ...

Sporadic Verizon Service Outage

All hand were on deck this morning when I woke up and could not access our services from home. After some troubleshooting, I finally figured out that this is an isolated incident to my Verizon service. After going through 100 menu options on the phone, I was finally able to speak with a technical support rep and was told that there are outages nationwide causing problems. I was told that this would be resolved in the next 2 hours.

If your internet service provider is Verizon, you may experience problems accessing BitTitan services (and potentially other sites and services on the internet) in which our website may not resolve at all by your browser.

This isn't the first time that Verizon has had an outage. This past weekend, a fire at one of Seattle premiere data centers had a fire which caused an outage.