Technology

When it comes to mobile technology, trends mean so much more than any single event.

That's a notion we see reinforced time and time again here in the land o' Android — and that's why so much of our focus in this little corner of the internub is on the bigger-picture view of what's going on with Google. By looking at those broader trends, we can get a sense of how the company's strategies are shifting and what those changes suggest about the future of Android and other mobile tech efforts.

We had no shortage of such matters to consider in 2019 — and some of the trends we've observed over these past 12 months will almost certainly inform the patterns we'll see over the course of the coming year.

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User at this remote site has the task of helping with the backup-tape rotation on the local server, reports a pilot fish in the main office.

&After working the user on a tape-drive cleaning issue, we suggested that she get a can of compressed air and blow out the drive,& fish says.

&User called back in tears. She said she sprayed the inside of the unit with WD-40 instead of air.

&Pretty much in total disbelief, we were hoping that maybe she just shot one small burst. When questioned about how much she sprayed, her response was, ‘I&m not sure. While I was spraying I realized the can didn&t get cold, so I looked to see what was wrong.&

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Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Itfinally 2020, the year that should bring us a direct listing from home-sharing giant Airbnb, a technology company valued at tens of billions of dollars. The companyflotation will be a key event in this coming yeartechnology exit market. Expect the NYSE and Nasdaq to compete for the listing, bankers to queue to take part, and endless media coverage.

Given that thatahead, we&re going to take periodic looks at Airbnb as we tick closer to its eventual public market debut. And that means that this morning we&re looking back through time to see how fast the company has grown by using a quirky data point.

Airbnb releases a regular tally of its expected &guest stays& for New YearEve each year, including 2019. We can therefore look back in time, tracking how quickly (or not) AirbnbNew Year Eve guest tally has risen. This exercise will provide a loose, but fun proxy for the companygrowth as a whole.

The numbers

Before we look into the figures themselves, keep in mind that we are looking at a guest figure which is at best a proxy for revenue. We don&t know the revenue mix of the guest stays, for example, meaning that Airbnb could have seen a 10% drop in per-guest revenue this New YearEve — even with more guest stays — and we&d have no idea.

So, the cliche about grains of salt and taking, please.

But as more guests tends to mean more rentals which points towards more revenue, the New YearEve figures are useful as we work to understand how quickly Airbnb is growing now compared to how fast it grew in the past. The faster the company is expanding today, the more itworth. And given recent news that the company has ditched profitability in favor of boosting its sales and marketing spend (leading to sharp, regular deficits in its quarterly results), how fast Airbnb can grow through higher spend is a key question for the highly-backed, San Francisco-based private company.

Herethe tally of guest stays in Airbnbduring New Years Eve (data via CNBC, Jon Erlichman,Airbnb), and their resulting year-over-year growth rates:

• 2009: 1,400
• 2010: 6,000 (+329%)
• 2011: 3,1000 (+417%)
• 2012: 108,000 (248%)
• 2013: 250,000 (+131%)
• 2014: 540,000 (+116%)
• 2015: 1,100,000 (+104%)
• 2016: 2,000,000 (+82%)
• 2017: 3,000,000 (+50%)
• 2018: 3,700,000 (+23%)
• 2019: 4,500,000 (+22%)

In chart form, that looks like this:

Lettalk about a few things that stand out. First is that the companygrowth rate managed to stay over 100% for as long as it did. In case you&re a SaaS fan, what Airbnb pulled off in its early years (again, using this fun proxy for revenue growth) was far better than a triple-triple-double-double-double.

Next, the companygrowth rate in percentage terms has slowed dramatically, including in 2019. At the same time the firm managed to re-accelerate its gross guest growth in 2019. In numerical terms, Airbnb added 1,000,000 New YearEve guest stays in 2017, 700,000 in 2018, and 800,000 in 2019. So 2019gross adds was not a record, but it was a better result than its year-ago tally.