VAT is a mess, though. definitely. but then you hire an accountant and you get VAT + all that other tax stuff "abstracted" away for a very reasonable cost.
If you need a legal presence in the US it's actually easiest to start two companies, one on each side of the pond, with one of them owning the other.
You should definitely go to a tax consultant knowing this stuff if you consider doing such things.
What the US does do, however (as I understand it), is tax you on the difference between the income tax you pay in a foreign country and what you would pay if you were in the US. In other words, living in a foreign country with lower income tax than the US won't let you avoid paying at least as much income tax as if you were still in the US. (And if you move somewhere with higher taxes the US won't charge you any extra (nor give you tax credits! :P).)
0 - https://www.irs.gov/Businesses/International-Businesses/Unit...
Q: In function, how does the popularity-based sorting differ from feedly's current popularity algorithm?
The Idea behind my popularity algorithm is that I don't want to calculate what is popular among the Users of my service. Instead I want to estimate what is popular with the original User base of each Feed you subscribe to. I think the average User base of The New York Times is different from the typical reddit, twitter or facebook crowd. So this should be an interesting Differentiator.
Fingers crossed that you're also going to have an eye for security
Note that Foratis does not do the VAT registration for you, like some other shelf corporation providers. I didn't realize this and it became a minor pain. Whatever you do, budget for a competent Steuerberater. DIY is nearly impossible unless you have strong German skills, and even my native business owner friends don't DIY when it comes to Finanzamt dealings :)