Astrill, only VPN with a good track record in China where I happen to live.

Most others crap out after a few weeks or months, and never bother to fix their protocols.

Key Messages rocks. Comes with built-in badword filter and some other nifty config.

Not open source though.

The app is asking for a million permissions that are completely unnecessary. They are just as much of a data kraken as facbeook, google and apple, with the exception of people being fully transparent about professional achievements and qualifications. That’s a definite reason to never give them access to my phone.

Through investors, who consider the revenue a good indication for future profits. So they float the bill and receive shares in the company instead, and cash out during the IPO.

*billion

And profitability is not the same as generating revenue.

You can earn $200M a quarter and still have expenses of $220M, meaning you’re making a net loss.

That’s why companies focus on exponential growth first and don’t really care about portability, but once the userbase is large enough, they will try to monetize it. Either through ads, or paid subscriptions, premium plans, special avatars, etc.

That will surely piss of some of the early adopters, but usually isn’t significant enough to make an actual dent.

The last step (which we have also seen) is then kicking out staff. That has two effects:

1., It brings down the overhead (= salaries and attached taxes & social security) 2. The revenue per capita is inflated, i.e. it looks as if every employee is generating 4000 bucks instead of 2500 (random example), which is something that looks good in an IPO prospectus.