Airbnb is about to face some more competition in the U.S. with Marriott’s reported entrance into the home-sharing business. On the heels of a successful home-sharing pilot in Europe, Airbnb is gearing up to launch a home rentals product in the U.S., according to the Wall Street Journal. Marriott is expected to make the plans public as early as next month.
While Marriott is the largest hotel operator with 1.29 million guest rooms around the globe, according to STR, Airbnb is the largest room provider with 4.92 million listings on its platform, according to AirDNA.
Marriott’s entrance into the U.S. comes after its home-sharing pilot in Europe, where it offered nearly 400 homes to customers in Paris, Rome, Lisbon and London. The timing of its product is notable, given Airbnb’s recent acquisition of HotelTonight and its impending initial public offering. However, Airbnb is actively trying to become more than just a home-sharing platform, with hotel booking, travel arrangements for business trips, experiences and even original programming.
In January, Airbnb said it was profitable on an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) basis for the second year in a row in 2018.
I’ve reached out to Marriott and will update this story if I hear back.
Source: TechCrunch
Researchers will get to parse Facebook ad data, the popularity of news items and URL data sets.
Source: CNET
How did this game-changing event not leak?
Source: CNET
If you’re going up against an army of the undead, maybe plan a little better.
Source: Wired
Your last 10 emails with a recruiter before an onsite interview probably shouldn’t be about rebooking your canceled flight.
Pana is a Denver startup now setting its sights on the corporate travel market, with a specific eye towards killing the back-and-forth email or spreadsheet coordination. The startup, founded in 2015, first tried to gain an inroad with consumers, but its $49 per month individual-focused travel concierge plan probably limited its reach.
The company’s latest shot at taking on corporate travel lets companies use the service to outsource dealing with out-of-network “guests.” The startup is looking to take this path as an inroad into the broader corporate travel market, and is making the apparent choice to work with more expansive corporate travel companies like SAP’s Concur rather than against them, initially at least.
The company just closed a $10 million Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Techstars, Matchstick Ventures, and MergeLane Fund. Previous investors also include 500 Startups, FG Angels and The Galvanize Fund.
Pana is already booking thousands of trips per month for companies using the service to coordinate business travel for interviewees. Rather than leaving recruiters to the arduous process of back-and-forth messaging to hammer out initial details, Pana takes care of it through an omni-channel mesh of automation and human concierge in-app chat, text or email.
“A key piece of the value proposition is that if you do ask something complex, we’re going to instantly connect you to a human agent,” founder Devon Tivona told TechCrunch in an interview. “When it does go to a person, we have a five-minute response time.”
Getting a flight booked for someone outside the company directory can be challenging enough, but with travel, everything grows infinitely more complex the second that something goes awry. In addition to functioning as a tool for coordination, the startup’s team of assistants are there to help re-book flights or re-arrange travel if everything doesn’t go according to plan.
Even if Pana is working with the big corporate travel agencies today, its investors are banking on the startup accomplishing what the giants can’t at their scale.
“…Whenever a really large incumbent, particularly in software gets acquired, and I’m thinking about when SAP acquired Concur five or so years ago, it creates this massive innovation gap that allows, I’d say, new startups to really reinvent the status quo,” Bessemer partner Kristina Shen told TechCrunch in an interview.
Pana’s current customers include Logitech, Quora and Shopify, among others.
Source: TechCrunch
Seven years ago, Rachel Haurwitz finished her last day as a student in the University of California laboratory where she helped conduct some of the pioneering research on the gene editing technology known as CRISPR, and became employee number one at Caribou Biosciences, a company founded to commercialize that research.
In those seven years, the market for CRISPR applications has grown tremendously and Caribou Biosciences is at the forefront of the companies propelling it forward.
Which is why we’re absolutely thrilled to have Haurwitz join us on stage at Disrupt SF 2019.
Haurwitz studied under Caribou Biosciences’ co-founder Jennifer Doudna — one of the scientists who discovered CRISPR’s gene editing applications — and Caribou was formed to be the conduit through which the groundbreaking research from the Berkeley lab would become products that companies could use.
Short for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats”, CRISPR works by targeting certain sequences of DNA — the genetic instructions for the development and reproduction of all organisms — and then binding them to an enzyme that cuts the specific sequence.
Once edited, researchers can add or simply delete pieces of genetic material, or change the DNA by replacing a segment with customized code designed to achieve specific functions.
There are few industries that CRISPR doesn’t have the power to transform. Already, Caribou Biosciences technology is being used at Intellia, which is developing therapies based on CRISPR technologies (Haurwitz is a co-founder). And that’s just the beginning.
Caribou’s chief executive thinks of her company as a platform for developing technologies in therapeutics, research, agriculture and industrial biology.
Already, CRISPR technologies are being used to biologically manufacture chemicals, replace pesticides and fertilizers, and provide cures for rare diseases once though impossible.
“Any market with bio-based products will be changed by gene editing,” Haurwitz has said.
At SF Disrupt Haurwitz will talk about the implications of that transformation, and what’s ahead for the company that’s leading the charge in this genetic revolution.
Tickets are available here.
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Source: TechCrunch
Can a printer look good enough to reside in your living room? The Tango X does. With its fabric cover, it looks somewhat like a large, fabric-covered coffee-table book. But looks aren’t everything — it also prints quite well.
The post HP Tango X review appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
This 24-hour flash sale features models from Beats, Bose, Sonos and Ultimate Ears.
Source: CNET
Mirantis, the company you may still remember as one of the biggest players in the early days of OpenStack, launched an interesting new hosted SaSS service today that makes it easier for enterprises to build and deploy their on-premises clouds. The new Mirantis Model Designer, which is available for free, lets operators easily customize their clouds — starting with OpenStack clouds next month and Kubernetes clusters in the coming months — and build the configurations to deploy them.
Typically, doing so typically involves writing lots of YAML files by hand, something that’s error-prone and few developers love. Yet that’s exactly what’s at the core of the infrastructure-as-code model. Model Designer, on the other hand, takes what Mirantis learned from its highly popular Fuel installer for OpenStack and takes it a step further. The Model Designer, which Mirantis co-founder and CMO Boris Renski demoed for me ahead of today’s announcement, presents users with a GUI interface that walks them through the configuration steps. What’s smart here is that every step has a difficulty level (modeled after Doom’s levels ranging from “I’m too young to die” to “ultraviolence” — though it’s missing Dooms ‘nightmare’ setting), which you can choose based on how much you want to customize the setting.
Model Designer is an opinionated tool, but it does give users quite a bit of freedom, too. Once the configuration step is done, Mirantis actually takes the settings and runs them through its Jenkins automation server to validate the configuration. As Renski pointed out, that step can’t take into account all of the idiosyncrasies of every platform, but it can ensure that the files are correct. After this, the tools provides the user with the configuration files and actually deploying the OpenStack cloud is then simply a matter of taking the files, together with the core binaries that Mirantis makes available for download, to the on-premises cloud and executing a command-line script. Ideally, that’s all there is to the process. At this point, Mirantis’ DriveTrain tools take over and provision the cloud. For upgrades, users simply have to repeat the process.
Mirantis’ monetization strategy is to offer support, which range from basic support to fully managing a customer’s cloud. Model Designer is yet another way for the company to make more users aware of itself and then offer them support as they start using more of the company’s tools.
Source: TechCrunch
And you thought you could maneuver out of dangerous situations.
Source: Wired