The love-struck groom splurged on the bridal penthouse suite, five-course dinners, pricey souvenirs — the works. He figured it was the trip of a lifetime, and they’d eventually pay it off. They were just a few days into their trip when Rebecca revealed that she had some debt … No property. No assets. The couple talked it out and formed a plan to pay it down. Step No. 1? Drastically changing their spending habits. Even in the City of Lights, you can eat cheaply. Just ask Rebecca and Garry, who spent the rest of their evenings sharing crusty bread and stinky cheese — and toasting with tap water. They’ve been married for five years now, and when things get a little tight between paychecks, they make a date with that very meal under the stars in their backyard! The Moral: Before tying the knot, have an honest discussion about your respective financial commitments and goals.

So they set a price that would help them meet that goal without considering the real market value of their listing. And some people, unfortunately, just gave up. Clearly, Airbnb needed to offer people a better way-an automated source of pricing information to help hosts come to a decision. That’s why we started building pricing tools in 2012 and have been working to make them better ever since. This June, we released our latest improvements. We started doing dynamic pricing-that is, offering new price tips daily based on changing market conditions. We tweaked our general pricing algorithms to consider some unusual, even surprising characteristics of listings. And we’ve added what we think is a unique approach to machine learning that lets our system not only learn from its own experience but also take advantage of a little human intuition when necessary. In the online world, a number of companies use algorithms to set or suggest prices.

To you, our customers, I hope you’ll be as inspired as I was by the article on Melinda. Thanks for flying with us, and our best to you and yours from all of us at Alaska and Horizon this holiday season. It is early morning in Seattle and several hundred teachers from across the United States are gathered in a hotel ballroom for the Elevating and Celebrating Effective Teaching and Teachers conference (ECET2). This morning’s surprise guest is Melinda Gates and as she arrives on stage the teachers cheer like sports fans. From the back of the room I can see hundreds of tiny images of Melinda on cellphone screens seconds from being published on social media channels everywhere. We’re caught up in a star sighting: She’s here, and she’s real. Because I live in Seattle, I’ve followed the Gates Foundation over the past 15 years. Some of my friends got jobs there on fascinating projects around the world, and I watched the headquarters rise between the Space Needle and Highway 99. But it all seemed rather distant, geographically and metaphorically, and I didn’t start truly noticing the foundation’s work until Melinda stepped up in 2012 to advocate for women and girls.

Once an app is launched, it runs on the Chromecast, but a communication channel will be open that allows the client device to act as a sort of remote control. This dynamic allows you to turn off your mobile device without stopping whatever is streaming from the Chromecast to your TV. To set up Chromecast, you have to use the Google Home app on mobile devices, or Google’s Chrome web browser on a computer. Once the Chromecast is set up, you use third-party apps like Netflix, YouTube or the Chrome browser to do the actual launching and controlling of your content. There are currently other apps that work in conjunction with set-top boxes like gaming systems to enable you to use a smartphone or tablet as a remote control. But in those cases, you have to launch the app on the set-top box and the app on the mobile device and run them simultaneously.