Photo: Gregory Costanzo (Getty Images)
For Airbnb hosts, there are few things scarier than the thought of a guest throwing a big party in their home. Whether it’s lunatics damaging furniture while listening to LMFAO, beer staining the carpet, or confetti peppering the floor, it isn’t uncommon for hundreds of dollars of damages to be left in the wake of a short stay. (Remember that home that was turned into a temporary brothel?)
Since Airbnb was founded in 2008, there have been hundreds of thousands of reports of broken items after a stay. In most cases, the host has simply been referred to a Resolution Center where they can make a claim on the security deposit.
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NoiseAware saw this as a huge opportunity for Airbnb hosts to take matters into their own hands. Of course, we don’t mean beating up guests or sending a hitman to their doorstep. What we’re talking about are acoustic devices that are built specifically to measure and track noise levels in a house environment.
NoiseAware is exactly the sort of thing you don’t want to see on the ceiling when you have two kegs and 20 friends heading over to your Airbnb. Once mounted, it continually reads decibel levels, noticing a difference between normal conversation and a dozen people rocking out to Rage Against the Machine. This probably sounds like a complete invasion of privacy, but NoiseAware swears that it is completely incapable of recording audio conversations. (Didn’t the NSA say the same thing?)
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This week NoiseAware announced its Gen 3 device is ready for launch in November. The company has spent several months iterating over the prior model and believes it has something that has a better user experience than the likes of competitors such as Amazon’s Alexa Guard and Hive’s Hub 360.
