“One price for all” policy at Update 2011 (or “why VAT is a bitch”)
Introducing Update's "one price for all" policy. Our solution for dealing with the VAT issue.
Beyond the administrative headache, charging VAT creates two price tiers: one for VAT-registered individuals and companies and one for non-VAT-registered ones. Basically, if you're not VAT registered, you end up paying 20% more for things. What this means in practice is that individuals that can afford it the least (mostly freelancers, if you think about the audience for Update) get shafted with an additional 20%. That sucks.
Introducing Update's "one price for all" policy. Our solution for dealing with the VAT issue.
In the US, the WiFi models are going for $499, $599, and £699 and the 3G models are $629, $729, and $829.
For a VAT registered business or individual, it's actually cheaper – anywhere from £13 to £42 – to buy an iPad in the UK than it is to buy one in California.
A lot of what we're doing this year is building infrastructure. Singularity is a new breed of conference and we are doing a lot of work behind the scenes to ensure that we have the solid foundations we need not just to run it this year but to build upon for future years. My friends and fellow team members will probably tire of hearing the worlds "focus", "form follows function", and "solid foundations" over the course of the next few months if they haven't already. Our focus is on building a stable, functional platform to host global conferences on. There won't be any frivolous bells and whistles and whizz-bang eye-candy. Instead, we are building a minimalist, accessible social site and a stable and functional conference application. As I keep telling myself and everyone around me: focus, focus, focus!
Unfortunately, especially for e-commerce systems, there isn't a simple way to check the validity of a European VAT number. The European Commission provides a web site where you can validate VAT numbers by entering them in an HTML form. This is not practical, of course, for web applications.
Enter, the European VAT Number Validation API that I just hacked together on Google App Engine.