Airbnb has called on the Government to introduce regulations for the short-term letting market to help deal with the rental crisis in Dublin.
“We want to be regulated,” Airbnb’s head of policy Chris Lehane told The Irish Times, adding that there was a need for new regulations to deal with the impact of the new technology on the market. “We are hopeful and optimistic Government will want to do something that works.”
The company has been blamed in part for exacerbating the rental crisis in Ireland, particularly in major cities, with some landlords preferring to rent their properties on a short-term basis through Airbnb rather than deal with long-term tenants.
Space nerds, get ready to get up close and personal with the Red Planet. On July 27, Mars will be the closest it’s been to Earth in 15 years. To celebrate the fact that Mars, the Earth, and the sun will be in a straight line during the course of their orbits—an event known as opposition—Airbnb hosts are getting in on the fun.
Airbnb frequently touts its economic impact in “diverse” neighborhoods, saying guests spend money locally and boost businesses in areas where tourism is not already prevalent.
But a new Purdue University study found that white neighborhoods – not their black or Latino counterparts – are the ones most likely to benefit from an influx of Airbnb guests.
The study found that users of the home sharing platform generally eat in the neighborhood restaurants near where they are staying. However the spillover effect does not hold true when 50 percent or more of a neighborhood’s residents are black or Hispanic.
Alexia Bonatsos has watched countless startups come and go. First as the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch, and now in her current role as the founder of venture capital firm Dream Machine,
Bonatsos’ job has been to understand what makes a tech company succeed. “A lot of it’s gut, but gut’s not magical woo-woo dust,” she says. “It’s taking in data and information and eventually making a decision based on that.”
Bonatsos has seen thousands of companies, and so on today’s episode of Converge, we turned the tables. Using two decks of cards — one with a set of famous companies and the other with a set of random nouns — we invited Bonatsos to draw two cards, and pitch us the resulting company.