The short-term rental market is growing, and Expedia understandably wants a piece of it. After snapping up Orbitz and Travelocity earlier this year, it has now decided to purchase HomeAway. It’s an online service that focuses on renting out vacation homes, further intensifying Expedia’s rivalry with Airbnb. The travel empire has been displaying HA properties alongside hotels for a couple of years, but it will now completely own the company and all its brands. In its press release , Expedia admits that it has agreed to pay a hefty $3.9 billion for HomeAway, because it has “long had [its] eyes on the fast growing ~$100 billion alternative accommodations space.” Both companies are expecting to close the deal in 2016, and if they obtain regulatory approval, Expedia will pay in cash and stock worth $38.31 per share. Source: Expedia , Bloomberg , The New York Times , HomeAway , Reuters , USA Today
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Expedia to pay $3.9 billion for Airbnb competitor HomeAway
An anonymous reader writes: A class-action suit has been filed against Apple in U.S. District Court over Wi-Fi Assist being turned on by default in iOS 9. Wi-Fi Assist is designed to switch to cellular data when a user is trying to perform an action over the internet on a poor Wi-Fi signal. This has the natural side effect of using cellular data. Since iOS 9 turned it on for many users, they weren’t necessarily expecting that extra use, causing some of them to exceed their data caps. A former Apple employee who was in a leadership position for Mac OS X Wi-Fi software has commented on the issue, saying that the Wi-Fi Assist mess was unavoidable given how Apple’s management treats that part of the business. Quoting :”[O]ne particular directorial edict which I pushed back against at the end of my tenure sticks out as not just particularly telling, but deeply misguided: ‘Make it self-healing.’ Self healing in this context meaning that the networking system, Wi-Fi in particular, should try to correct problems that caused the network to fail, which, if you have spent any time trying to diagnose networking issues is a clear misunderstanding of the issues involved. … Asking the devices which connect to this vast complex network of networks to detect, and then transparently fix problems in the infrastructure without the permission of the administrators is, well, it’s absolutely the pinnacle of buzzword driven product management. Real pointy-haired boss territory.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 