Technology

Airbnb brings in billions of dollars of revenue annually and is profitable on an EBITDA basis, so many wonder if and when the home-sharing company will go public. At the Code Conference today, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company will &be ready to IPO next year, but I don&t know if we will.&

He added that he wants to make sure ita major benefit to the company when Airbnb does go public. Following some more probing, Chesky said he has &no issues with [going public] at all. It could happen.&

Meanwhile, Airbnb has been struggling from a regulatory standpoint since at least 2010. Specifically, San Francisco and New York are two of the most difficult cities from a regulatory standpoint, Chesky said.

In New York, for example, there has been a standstill since 2010. At this point, Chesky said he expects it to take a few more years to overcome the challenge in New York.

&It doesn&t seem like the end is in sight with that challenge,& Chesky said. That challenge, Chesky said, involves the hotel industry and unions that &have galvanized people in these perpetual battles.&

Another general critique of Airbnb is its effect on rising rent costs and displacement. Chesky added that if it was simply a business decision, &it probably wouldn&t be worth it to stay there& in New York. But Chesky said there are hosts who have come to rely on Airbnb to earn income.

At Code, Chesky also touted Airbnb&sexperiences product and how itgrowing 10x faster than its homes product. Airbnb Experiences sees 1.5 million bookings a year, Chesky said. Experiences, which Airbnb started testing in 2014 and officially launched in 2016, is Airbnbproduct that helps travelers find things to do in cities throughout the world.

When it first launched, Airbnb didn&t verify the experiences, but after some bad experiences, Airbnb has started verifying them.

&They&re doing incredibly well,& Chesky said. He added that the &experience economy& is growing and &there will probably be a massive economy around experiences.&

Google is adding a small but useful feature to Google Calendar. Starting today, when you change or delete an event, a dialog box now pops up that allows you to attach a short message to the event to explain why you are making the change and whatchanging.

Here is how this new feature will work: When you make a change, a dialog box will pop up and allow you to enter a message for your guests. On the event page in Google Calendar itself — and in the email that alerts your guests of the change — that message will then appear at the top of the event details section.

I&m guessing that at least half of the calendar invites I get change a few times before I actually get on the call. Itgenerally unclear what has changed, though. The new dialog box appears automatically, so far more people will now explain their changes than before.

Itnothing fancy and itactually a surprise that Google hasn&t done this before, but chances are that people will be using it all day long.

This new feature is now rolling out to all G Suite users and should be available to everybody (no matter whether theiradmins have them on the rapid release or schedule release schedule) within the next three days.

Facebook Messenger Kids application, which allows children under 13 to chat with parents& approval, is today rolling out a small, but notable change & it no longer requires that the childrenparents be Facebook friends with one another, in order for the children to connect. This solves one of the problems with the appearlier design, where it operated more like an extension of a parents& own social circle, instead of one for their child.

Of course, parents still have to approve every contact their child adds, as usual.

As any parent understands, there are always going to be those friends of your child where you have an acquaintance-type, friendly but casual relationship with the parents that falls short of earning &Facebook friend& status. While you might text them for the occasional play date or nod politely at drop-off, you&re not necessarily &friends.& But your kids are friends with each other. And you&re fine with that.

The Messenger Kids update now allows those kids to connect, if you okay it.

The new feature will still require that both parents are on Facebook.

On Facebook, the parent visits the Messenger Kids section in Facebookown main navigation menu, as per usual, and does a search for the name of the parents of the childfriends. You can then invite them to get the app and allow the children to connect.

This change could potentially help the app grow beyond the 500,000 installs it now has, according to Sensor Tower data & especially once the kids figure out how this invite system works. (And don&t put it past them to just inform you.)

Facebook says it made this decision as a direct result of parent feedback.

However, there is one challenge in not being good friends with the other kids& parents: it can be harder to discuss problems like bullying or bad behavior, if they come up. With my daughterhalf a dozen or so friends on Messenger Kids (hey, I know), I&m not worried about these things because I know the parents well enough to have a discussion if the kids start fighting. We&d work together to resolve the problems, were they to occur. (And obviously, her family connections on the app are not an issue).

But when you start approving connections with those families you&re less close to, you may run into issues and not have a good way to communicate about them.

Thatwhy Facebook should be working to roll out systems that flag concerns in kids& chat sessions & if a bad word is used, for example, or if the child says something rude & that alerts the childown parents. The company already has A.I.-based anti-bullying technology that could do this now. And I imagine many parents would opt into a system that asks if you wanted to be alerted to offensive language in chats.

Even a simple chat and call log could help parents address problems & like tell me how often I need to remind my daughter that we don&t place video calls to friends before 9 AM…even if you see them playing Animal Jam and know they&re online.Rules are rules, kiddo.

As it stands now, the best way to monitor the childchats is to install a second copy of the app on your own device and actually read them. That takes time and can be a little bit invasive for older kids, who have more of a sense of privacy.

The update is live today on the Messenger Kids app.

* This post was updated after publication with more current install data from Sensor Tower. Earlier, we said Messenger Kids had 350K installs as of April. It has now just passed 500K.