Technology

Business travelers have become an increasingly important part of the Airbnb business, according to a new blog post. The company says that Airbnb for Work, which launched in 2014, has seen bookings triple from 2015 to 2016, and triple again from 2016 to 2017. In fact, Airbnb says that almost 700,000 companies have signed up for and booked with Airbnb for Work.

Interestingly, the breakdown of companies working with Airbnb for traveler lodging are pretty diverse — employees from large enterprise companies (5,000+ employees) and employees from startups and SMBs (one to 250 employees) take a 40-40 split, with the final 20 percent of Airbnb for Work bookings going to mid-sized companies.

In July of 2017, Airbnb started making its listings available via SAP Concur, a tool used by a large number of business travelers. Airbnb says that this integration has been a huge help to growing Airbnb for Work, with Concur seeing a 42 percent increase in employees expensing Airbnb stays from 2016 to 2017. Moreover, 63 percent of ConcurFortune 500 clients have booked a business trip on Airbnb.

One interesting trend that Airbnb has noticed is that nearly 60 percent of Airbnb for Work trips had more than one guest.

&We can offer big open areas for collaborations, while still giving employees their own private space,& said David Holyoke, global head of business travel at Airbnb. &We think this offers a more meaningful business trip and it saves the company a lot of money.&

Given the tremendous growth of the business segment, as well as the opportunity it represents, Airbnb is working on new features for business travelers. In fact, in the next week, Airbnb will be launching a new feature that lets employees search for Airbnb listings on a company-specific landing page.

So, for example, a Google employee might search for their lodging on Google.Airbnb.com, and the site would be refined to cater to Googlepreferences, including locations close to the office, budget, and other factors.

While the growth has picked up, Holyoke still sees Airbnb for Work as an opportunity to grow. He said that Airbnb for Work listings only represent 15 percent of all Airbnb trips.

But, the introduction of boutique hotels and other amenity-driven listings such as those on Airbnb Plus are paving the way for business travelers to lean toward Airbnb instead of a business hotel.

Plus, as mobility and relocation become even more important to how a business operates, Airbnb believes it can be a useful tool to help employees get started in a new town before they purchase a home.

When weighing up the likely success of challenger banks in the U.K., two predominant schools of thought emerge.

Those who are bullish say that incumbent banks provide a lousy user experience, rip off customers, and innovate incredibly slowly — and therefore are ripe for the taking. Challenger banks just need to focus on what they do best and word of mouth-led switching will follow.

And then there are people who are less convinced who say that most consumers are happy enough with their current bank account and see no reason to switch. Besides, anything innovative a challenger does will be copied by incumbents eventually anyway.

But what if switching was only one means to customer acquisition One argument I&ve sometimes made is that grabbing customers from a competing bank isn&t the only way to grow a challenger bank. Another customer segment is people who don&t have an existing current account, such as recent immigrants or young people who need to open their very first bank account.

In fact, incumbent banks have long targeted students, for example, with attractive student overdrafts or by setting up shop on university campuses. Thathow Barclays first won my business and why I still lazily bank with them today.

Enter challenger bank Monzo, which early on in its existence experimented with a Monzo ambassador program at a number of universities, with only limited success. Today the fintech is moving the funnel forward slightly by making its digital current account offering available to 16-18 year olds, opening up the bank to more than 1.5 million new young people.

Monzo says that 16 and 17 year old customers can sign up for a Monzo bank account today by downloading the app. They&ll then receive a contactless debit card in the post the next working day. Certain banking features, such as overdrafts and spending on gambling, will be blocked until customers turn 18.

With more than 860,000 registered account holders and set to cross 1 million accounts in the next few months, Monzo has employed a number strategies to grow customers, with a heavy emphasis on viral features and a fresh, young brand.

These have included making friend-to-friend payments easy, either to people who already bank with the startup, or via the Monzo.me service, which gives users a payment link to share with friends.

The idea, as Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield (picture above) often explains, is that unlike traditional incumbent banks that basically have zero network effects (perhaps beyond joint accounts), the challenger bank is designed to become more useful the more people who join it.

More recently, the challenger bank launched ‘Nearby Friends&, geolocation functionality that uses Bluetooth to let you see anyone else that uses Monzo who is nearby so that you can initiate a payment without needing their phone number to be in your contact book first.

Thereyet more Alex Jones/Infowars news.Facebook yanked four of the conspiracy theoristvideos from its platform last week, and now it has finally taken more stringent action after it removed four Infowars pages from the social network entirely.

Over the weekend Spotify, Stitcher and Apple all removed Infowars audio content from their platforms days afterYouTube and then Facebook pulled four videos that were found to violate community standards.

A refresher for those who need it: Infowars hasbroadcast a range of conspiracy theories which have included claims 9/11 was an inside job and alternate theories to the San Bernardino shootings, while it has encouraged harassment of families of victims of the Sandy Hook shooting among other things.

Yet despite much attention on the organization and its use of social media,Facebookefforts to handle Infowarshave been confusing.

One of the four videos it removed had actually been cleared following a complaint one month ago, while the video purge saw Facebook hand a 30-day ban to Jones& personal account butthe Infowars page — where the content was posted — was ableto continue on as normal. That was down to the Facebook system of warnings/accumulated warnings for content violations and nothing to do with peddling fake news.Thatapparently ok.

Indeed, the four Infowars pages that have been &unpublished& —the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the InfoWars Page and the Infowars Nightly News Page — were punished for &repeated violations of Community Standards and accumulating too many strikes& after more videos and content were reported to Facebook by users of the social network.

&Upon review, we have taken [the pages] down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies,& the company explained in an announcement.

Facebook didn&t provide details of exactly which videos violated its policies and how, but it did say explicitly that its action were not relatedto fake news.

&Much of the discussion around Infowars has been related to false news, which is a serious issue that we are working to address by demoting links marked wrong by fact checkers and suggesting additional content, none of the violations that spurred todayremovals were related to this,& it said in a statement.

Facebook has opted to remain news-neutral, in the sense that only issues warnings based on community standards.

Thata controversial stance — it is instead pursuing a policy of fact-checking information and letting users make their own mind — but irrespective of whether you agree with that approach, its actions over the past week are problematic because they don&t scale. They rely squarely on the community flagging content in the first instance.

It isn&t clear why Facebook wasn&t able to conduct a more thorough analysis of these Infowars pages last week, when the initial complaints first rolled in. You&d imagine that therebeen enough interest in the topic to warrant a proactive investigation.

Instead, it has taken another week and more reporting of content from users to reach the inevitable conclusion that Infowars has more than just four offensive videos (!) and therefore its pages should be removed(!).

Facebook has chosen to police content based on community guidelines and not the accuracy of information, but the fact it takes so long to take action on the most obvious bad actors doesn&t bode well for finding other, less obvious pages lurking out there that also fall foul of its standards.

Based on that system, it will always be playing catch up.Given the damage that false information can have across its services — from swaying electionsto encouraging lynchings, religious violence and more — that simply isn&t good enough.