firehose

Airbnb's iPhone app.

Nigel Warren can get $105 a night for renting out his room in an East Village apartment on the vacation rentals site Airbnb, which is what he did for three nights during a trip to Colorado in September. When he returned, his landlord informed him that the building had been raided by officials from the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement, who alleged that the arrangement violated New York state’s illegal hotels law.

As a consequence, Warren is now facing $7,000 in fines from the City of New York. Warren had only rented his apartment twice in the two years before he got caught. "The amount of fines seems exorbitant based on what I did," he told a judge today.

Warren is now facing $7,000 in fines from the City of New York

On Thursday, Warren showed up at the New York City Environmental Control Board (ECB) in the Financial District for his fourth or fifth hearing on the matter (he couldn’t remember which). In the room were three representatives from Airbnb, including a lawyer from the prestigious firm Gibson Dunn, which filed a brief on Warren’s behalf.

It’s the first time Airbnb, a Silicon Valley darling with a multi-billion dollar valuation, has intervened in such a case. The company makes it easy for anyone to convert property into an amateur hotel — a little too easy, officials in some cities say. Safety and fire code standards tend to be stricter for hotels than for residential dwellings, and hotels are often subject to extra taxes. Furthermore, the issue affects a ton of groups, including landlords, neighbors, tenant associations, and housing associations.

New York City has become the focus of Airbnb’s national fight against regulators. "What we’d like to do is figure out a way to make New York the model city," David Hantman, Airbnb’s public policy chief, told Skift in January.

Airbnb took 300,000 bookings in New York City last year and is growing fast. The company is on track to do $1 billion in bookings in the city this year, startup investor Fred Wilson told The Verge.

But based on amendments to a state law passed in 2011, at least half of the listings on the site are illegal.

The New York law was amended in order to crack down on illegal hotels being run by companies such as Smart Apartments, which bought residential apartments and rented them out for short-term stays. The law seems to allow people to rent rooms under certain conditions, but forbids people from renting their entire apartments. The second category accounts for about half the listings based on sample searches conducted by The Verge.

It’s the first time Airbnb has intervened in such a case

The law apparently includes an exception for short-term rentals if the tenant is home, which would cover all the private and shared rooms that make up the rest of Airbnb’s inventory. That’s the exception that Warren argued, since his roommate was home while he was renting his room.

That interpretation goes against the spirit of the law, said Michael Burns, who argued on behalf of the Department of Buildings. "You don’t know these people? They’re not your friends?" he asked Warren, who affirmed. "They should stay in a hotel," Burns said.

If the ECB rules against Warren, it could mean the city considers all the listings on Airbnb illegal.

State senator Liz Krueger, who co-sponsored the recent legislation, believes there is a discrepancy between what Airbnb advertises and how it’s being used.

"A quick glance at Airbnb's New York listings will show a ton of listings for the same or similar apartments, listed by the same users," she said in an email statement. "Airbnb is acting as middleman for large illegal businesses like Toshi and Smart Apartments, which are illegally converting residential apartments for full-time use by visitors to New York."

"Airbnb is acting as middleman for large illegal businesses."

Airbnb says 87 percent of its New York City hosts have only one listing, which acknowledges that 13 percent come from hosts with multiple listings but contradicts the idea that the site is overrun by massive illegal hoteliers. Smart Apartments has definitely advertised on Airbnb before; the company has had a profile since November 2011.

The existence of large-scale listings doesn’t mean they’re being booked, however. While listings from bigger companies such as Smart Apartments frequently pop up on Craigslist, The Verge was unable to find listings on Airbnb that obviously belonged to a large-scale operation.

Warren’s case is bad press for Airbnb, which doesn’t make much of an effort to alert its users to the fact that they may be breaking the law. However, the company plans to push for an amendment or a new law that will unambiguously sanction Airbnb’s peer-to-peer model.

A judge will decide within a month whether to uphold the fines. In the meantime, he suggests New Yorkers avoid hosting on Airbnb.

Underground fungus and plants have long been known to have a mutually beneficial relationship — mycorrhizal fungi delivers nutrients to plants, and the plants give carbon back in exchange. Now, a new study published in Ecology Letters shows in addition to that tradeoff, the mycorrhizal fungus network that connects many plants actually lets those plants defend themselves against enemies like aphids. As reported by the BBC, the study focused on the chemical response many plants emit when under attack from aphids, which commonly feed on damaged plants — the response typically repels the attacks and also the aphid's natural predator. As part of the test, the researchers grew five broad bean plans — three that were connected through the mycorrhizal fungi network, and two that didn't have that network in place, and all of the plans were covered with bags to prevent chemical communication through the air.

The researchers then let a single plant be attacked with aphids, and discovered that un-infested plants began to mount the same chemical defenses, thanks to communication through the fungi network. Plants that weren't connected to the fungi, however, did not mount their defenses. Of course, the fungi have a stake in keeping the plants alive — if the plants die off from aphid attacks, the fungi won't receive its carbon transmission. Professor John Pickett of Rothamsted Research called the fungi / plant relationship "just such a fantastic signalling system." The researchers believe that this finding could help plants defend against aphid attacks by using a "sacrificial" plant that can warn the rest of the crops.

As the US continues to grapple with the idea of letting drones fly through the country's airspace, our neighbors to the north have reported a new milestone for unmanned aerial technology: the first life saved using a drone. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the province of Saskatchewan announced yesterday that they successfully used the small Draganflyer X4-ES helicopter drone to locate and treat an injured man whose car had flipped over in a remote, wooded area in near-freezing temperatures. Zenon Dragan, president and founder of the Draganfly company that makes the drone, said in a statement: "to our knowledge, this is the first time that a life may have been saved with the use of a sUAS (small Unmanned Aerial System) helicopter."

"this is the first time that a life may have been saved" by an unmanned helicopter

The injured driver, whose name has not been released, managed to call 911 from his mobile phone, but he didn't know his location and couldn't guide emergency responders to him. Police deployed a regular, manned helicopter equipped with night vision to try and find him, but they weren't able to in an initial sweep of the area. After several hours without any sign of the accident victim, they decided to try a Draganflyer drone with an infrared camera, flying it toward the last recorded location from his cell phone's GPS. Check out video of the harrowing rescue from the RCMP below:

The drone's infrared camera picked up three heat signatures, one of which turned out to be the man, who was "curled up in a ball at the base of a tree next to snow bank" and unresponsive, as the RCMP recounts in its official news release. Emergency responders took him to a hospital for treatment. " Without the UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] and FLIR [infrared camera], searchers would not have been able to locate the driver until daylight," the RCMP news release adds.

While a handful of other police agencies in Canada and the US have previously admitted to using drones in search-and-rescue operations, there haven't been any reports of these operations finding an injured person in time to get them medical attention. The first "drone arrest" was claimed by police in the UK in 2010.

By John Walker on May 10th, 2013 at 2:00 pm.

When you mention web-spinning games, there’s one distinct cry: Spider-Man 2! Lauded for its swooshing through the streets, it’s the game to which all others fall short in this respect. As we reported a few months back, the man responsible for that well-loved slinging is working on Energy Hook, that intends to take the mechanic and go further with it. That’s Jamie Fristrom, the technical director and designer on Spidey 2, who was the one who ensured that the webs had to attach to buildings, rather than the sky. And now he’s after you cash. All $1 of it.

Energy Hook appears to be a combination of accurate rope swinging, and stunt games like SSX. Fristrom’s odd Kickstarter goal of a single dollar is, he says, because he’s determined that he’s going to finish this game no matter how much is raised. But the more he gets, the better that game he can make will be. He has, in essence, gamed Kickstarter to be purely about pre-ordering and stretch goals.

Were you a cynical type, you could also argue he’s gaming Kickstarter to get around the need to clear a particular funding goal before he gets the cash – but then since so many projects deliberately set their figures lower than they need, and rely on stretch goals, if anything it seems a more honest approach. His stretch goals go up to $130,000 presently, with a new set of levels added at $90k, but the assurance is that the game will be finished and released if just a buck is raised. It’ll be interesting to see how donators react to the approach. It’ll be $10 to secure a copy of the game on release.

There’s an absolute ton of in-game footage in the KS video, which you can see here:

Google CEO Larry Page has reportedly canceled plans to launch the long rumored Wallet credit card ahead of the company's annual I/O developer event commencing next week. According to AllThingsD, Google will roll out updates to its Wallet service at the event — which include new rewards, offers, and loyalty points — but will not launch the credit card, after it performed badly in tests overseen by Google's chief executive.

Google is expected to roll out new rewards, offers, and loyalty point features at I/O

The company has been linked with the launch of a credit card since November, when a leaked version of the Wallet app revealed references to a physical card that would mimic a user's existing credit or debit cards. Google later provided more evidence that a Wallet card was coming, publishing details on a support page that stated the card would be compatible with any Android device running 2.3.3 or above.

Earlier this week, the company confirmed that vice president of Google Wallet, Osama Bedier, was leaving the company. AllThingsD's sources say Page had previously questioned the launch of a physical card, believing that the solution did not offer innovative features capable of rivalling payment startups like Square.