Next month, potentially one of the most complex public transactions I’ve seen this year…. IAC Group, the majority owner of Match Group, is effectively transferring Match Group to a standalone listing. This will leave IAC Group holding ANGI Homeservices (Angie’s List, Homeadvisory etc) and a number of other businesses. The transaction also cleans up the classes of shares and reallocates some debt to Match Group.

Before transaction:

• Match Group: listed on NASDAQ. Represents 20% of Match Group equity.
• IAC Group: listed on NASDAQ, includes 80% of Match Group equity, 83% of ANGI Homeservices and a collection of other businesses.
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While working on a new Rails project I needed to start building out mailer functions. Previously my preferred method has been building all the views within Rails using a library like Inky or Premailer-Rails and a lot of testing. Usually the resulting email views are below expectations but good enough.

I’d stumbled across Sendgrid email templates with easy handlebar markup and easy to use theme editors. This presented a number of advantages:

• no more tedious html and inline-css template editing
• no-code editing to the templates (i.e. non-developers can tweak marketing emails)
• mobile/text/html emails all done
• quick...

I have always wondered about the best, simplest and most secure way of assigning administrator privileges to users in a production environment while using Devise.

The generally accepted method is to have a boolean admin field in the user model. However in order to toggle this setting you can either seed administator records to your database, or temporarily have an editable field. You can also easily use an admin (like activeadmin) interface to manage user permissions.

This seemed a bit crude. On a recent project I setup a task to promote/demote and list users to have administrator privileges.

Charles Zhenghao Lu founded CAR Inc in 2007. CAR Inc offered short-term and long-term car rentals to customers across China. The business was taken through to IPO in 2014. At IPO there were several reputable backers including Hertz, Ctrip (now trip.com) and Warburg Pincus.

In 2016 Hertz sold down its investment in CAR Inc however retained a commercial agreement with CAR Inc until 2023, operating co-branded Hertz-CAR locations.

CAR Inc launched UCAR - a Didi/Uber competitor in 2015. Mr Lu remained as chairman of CAR Inc and left to run UCAR.

Mr Lu has recently been in the news as...

Keytone Dairy Corporation was established in 2011 for production and supply of NZ dairy and nutritional products. The business was listed on the ASX in July 2018. Keytone manufactures dairy and nutritional products under their own brands, ‘KeyDairy’ and ‘KeyHealth’, as well as various contract manufacturing arrangements (including Walmart China (Sam’s Club)). In mid 2019 Keytone acquired Omniblend, an Australian-based product developer and contract manufacturer. The acquisition enabled Keytone to increase manufacturing capacity, expand product range throughout the health and wellness sector and allow potential further vertical integration opportunities (more M&A/PD). In late 2019 a futher consumer foods business was...