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Group Nine Media revealed last month that it was forming a SPAC (short for special purpose acquisition corporation) in order to raise money for acquisitions.
The company has now moved forward with those plans, announcing last night that it had priced the SPAC’s IPO $10 at per unit, to raise a total of $200 million. It’s now trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GNACU; as of 2:53pm Eastern shares were up 6.55%. (Eventually, the Class A common stock will be listed as GNAC and warrants will be listed separately as GNACW.) The offering is expected to close on January 20.
The acquisition corporation, like Group Nine itself, is led by CEO Ben Lerer (pictured above). Imagination Capital Partner Richard D. Parsons and Reddit Chief Operating Officer Jen Wong are also on the board of directors.
Group Nine was formed in 2016 with backing from Discovery, merging Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo and Seeker. It subsequently acquired PopSugar, with co-founder Brian Sugar becoming president of both Group Nine and now Group Nine Acquisition Corp.
SPACs, also known as blank check corporations, have become an increasingly popular way for companies to raise money from the public markets. In its initial filing, Group Nine said it would use the funding “for the purpose of effecting a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/group-nines-spac-goes-public/
If you’ve got an Apple TV+ trial that’s set to expire sometime between now and June, good news: you’re getting some free bonus time.
Apple TV+ first launched in November of 2019, alongside a one-year free trial for anyone buying a new iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV or Mac. As those initial trials approached their end, Apple voluntarily extended them out to February of 2021. Now they’re extending them once again.
As first reported by 9to5Mac, any trial that previously would’ve expired from February to June of 2021 will now expire in July instead. We have confirmed these plans with Apple.
Users should expect to get an email about the extension in the coming weeks. If you’re already paying for AppleTV+ or have it as part of an Apple One bundle, meanwhile, you’ll be getting a $4.99 per month credit until the end of June.
If you haven’t already, take this as an opportunity to blast through Ted Lasso, which is probably the most charming thing anyone has made for TV in a decade. Central Park is also great, though it has yet to hook me in quite the same way as Loren Bouchard’s other series (Bob’s Burgers, Home Movies).
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/apple-is-extending-apple-tv-trials-again/
Block Party, an anti-harassment startup that aims to help folks feel safer on social media founded by Tracy Chou, launched today. Currently only available for Twitter, Block Party helps people filter out the content they don’t want to see and into what Block Party calls the Lockout Folder. That’s where all of the filtered-out content lives in the event you want to review it later.
“We think it’s important to still acknowledge that these people exist,” Chou told me.
If you pretend like it doesn’t exist, you might miss out on useful information or genuine connections.
“There’s a lot of good stuff that would get lost there,” she said. “There is a reason we use public platforms like Twitter.”
On the more negative side, she said, you still may need to check periodically to see if there’s someone threatening your physical safety.
Helpers play a big part of the Block Party experience. You can grant a trusted helper access to your Lockout Folder to let you know if there’s anything useful in there, or to simply block the trolls.
“It’s a lot easier for someone else to help you process it and flag something that is a concern,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to share that burden. The current design of most of these platforms is to put the burden of dealing with it solely on the person who’s being abused.”
The Lockout Folder also serves as a record-keeping tool in the event you need to present evidence of your harassment to a company, a lawyer or someone else.
Image Credits: Screenshot/Block Party
“It’s really about trying to make peoples lives easier,” Chou said. “It’s just so painful to have to see the abuse again when you’re filing the report.”
Block Party emerged from Chou’s own experiences working at platform companies like Facebook and Quora, as well as her experience as an outspoken advocate for diversity and inclusion in tech. At Quora, the block button was one of the first things she built after being harassed on the platform, Chou told me.
“There’s that perspective of having been on the inside and seeing how product and engineering teams work,” Chou said. “But also being a DEI activist and seeing how lack of representation on teams has impacted product decisions for the worst.”
Although Block Party is only available for Twitter users, the goal is to add other platforms and help folks address harassers that target them across multiple platforms. Block Party is currently free but plans to introduce subscription tiers. Still, Chou said she envisions the free version always existing.
To date, Block Party has raised a little less than $1.5 million in funding. Its lead pre-seed round was led by Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures. Other investors include Alexia Bonatsos, Ellen Pao, Alex Stamos and others.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/block-party-launch/
On the day a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, a worried GitHub employee warned his co-workers in the D.C. area to be safe.
After making a comment in Slack saying, “stay safe homies, Nazis are about,” a fellow employee took offense, saying that type of rhetoric wasn’t good for work, the former employee told me. Two days later, he was fired, with a human relations representative citing a “pattern of behavior that is not conducive to company policy” as the rationale for his termination, he told me.
In an interview with TechCrunch, the now-former employee said he was genuinely concerned about his co-workers in the area, in addition to his Jewish family members.
TechCrunch agreed to keep the identity of the terminated employee confidential due to fears of his and his family’s safety.
As Business Insider first reported, his firing led to employees circulating an internal letter asking GitHub to denounce white supremacy and Nazis. The employees also wanted answers about his firing. That led to GitHub CEO Nat Friedman telling employees the company would investigate the termination of the employee.
Now, the terminated employee says he is currently seeking counsel to ensure his family is protected, as well as figure out if he can receive damages or some other form of reconciliation. The fired employee said GitHub has reached out to him for help in the internal investigation, but is waiting to engage with the company until he has legal representation in place.
Still, he said he is not optimistic about the investigation.
“I am 90% sure it’s not genuine,” the terminated employee said of Friedman’s response. “This type of stuff had been said before. It happened with the ICE stuff where the company said let’s have discussions but then if you mention ICE, you get fired. I used to believe in this company, but now I don’t.”
Similar to what some employees are asking, the terminated employee sees this as an opportunity for GitHub to take a stance on white supremacy.
He said, “I feel like this could be an opportunity for GitHub to really do a purge and say ‘Do we want white supremacists at this company and how do we get Black leaders into executive management?’
The latter is something he said he’s been asking for since he joined GitHUb. But as he kept talking about the lack of diversity at the leadership level, he said he found his job at risk.
“When I kept talking about it, I got threatened being fired in October,” he said. “Both my managers had to come completely to my defense and beg them not to fire me when I pointed out how the sales team maybe has just two people of color.”
In a blanket statement to TechCrunch about the contents of this article, a GitHub spokesperson said:
We take all complaints of this nature very seriously. We are actively investigating the situation.
Upon his termination, the former employee said the company gave him two paychecks and sent him on his way. He said he would be open to some form of reconciliation, whether in the form of damages, healthcare coverage or something else. While he’s not looking for his job back, he says he would like to see more worker power at GitHub.
“If I had a magic wand, I’d love for the employees at GitHub to be able to have a union and represent people from marginalized communities,” he said.
The United States’ GPS system, which is operated by the Defense Department, offers every one of us critical infrastructure around what is known as positioning, navigation and timing (PNT). Positioning and navigation is obvious every time we open up a maps app, but timing is also a critical function of GPS — offering our smartphones and devices precision timing to ensure that compute processes are accurately synced.
As more of the economy relies on these systems, they have increasingly become a target of hackers through GPS spoofing. The government wants to create additional redundancy and resiliency in the sector, and has explored using commercial alternatives to augment or backup parts of the GPS system.
The Department of Transportation, under a Congressional mandate added to the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2018, ran a comprehensive evaluation of commercial alternatives to government-owned and operated GPS that could serve as a backup to our existing infrastructure.
Among the 11 companies considered in the study were a number of prominent positioning startups, including Satelles, which raised a $26 million round of capital in 2019; NextNav, which has raised a total of nearly $300 million including $120 million from Fortress a year ago; and Hellen Systems, which according to Crunchbase raised a small seed round last year.
You can read the full report from the DOT, which runs to 457 pages long and covers all 14 measures the researchers explored in evaluating these different PNT platforms.
The summary though is that there are a number of companies that offer decent backup capabilities for GPS, although the performance and cost vary widely. NextNav came out furthest ahead according to the researchers, who stated that “All [Technology Readiness Level]-qualified vendors demonstrated at least some PNT performance of value, but only one vendor, NextNav, demonstrated in all applicable use case scenarios.”
Beyond that, the DOT researchers said that “… none of the systems can universally backup the positioning and navigation capabilities provided by GPS and its augmentations.” Given the range of needs that GPS fulfills, they recommended that “a diverse universe of positioning and navigation technologies” be used to add resiliency in this infrastructure.
Finally, costs remain quite complicated to determine. Given the way that different positioning systems operate, the fixed and variable costs for each system are highly dependent on desired coverage area and necessary transmitter density. The researchers weren’t able to devise a clear opinion on the cost effectiveness of different systems, although they do offer some initial data that can provide early insight.
Given the importance of GPS and the desire for companies and the government to have reliable alternatives, VCs have dumped money on the PNT sector in recent years. Now, we have some hard data on which vendors are potentially picking up steam in terms of functionality and utility.
