United States: BlueZoo Inc, the manufacturer of Party Squasher, has obtained the sixth patent approval from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The company claims to be "the first occupant counter designed for short-term rental properties."

Patent application 2019/0172096 A1, mobile device detection and tracking, was approved on June 23, 2021. The patent describes a technology that passively monitors the number of guests in a rental property while ultimately protecting guest privacy.

Patent approval is the sixth item so far, reflecting the innovation that supports people's understanding of space.

BlueZoo Chief Technology Officer Jan-Willem Korver said: “Large gatherings and short-term rental parties have become a real problem for both the owners and the community. The community is eager to find ways to avoid problems caused by gatherings.

"Our engineering team is excited to provide technology to measure, predict and prevent gatherings in a privacy-preserving manner."

Airbnb banned thousands of meeting places before and during the pandemic, citing community concerns about parking, traffic, noise, vandalism, fighting, and overcrowding. Strong opposition from neighbors and communities put short-term rental business under the microscope, putting the livelihoods of millions of owners, operators and managers at risk.

Jan Jens, founder of the Jatina Group, a luxury rental company in Florida, said: "Party Squasher technology allows me to sleep better at night because I know my house will not be the headline news for the next party house. For example, detecting wifi signals while filtering out Innovations such as the capabilities of those anticipated equipment enable operators to estimate the number of guests in the hotel well without actually being in the hotel-so guests can enjoy complete privacy."

According to Party Squasher, privacy-preserving wifi technology protects the community better than noise monitoring devices that “cannot capture capacity, are easily tampered with, notoriously report false positives, and report only after the problem (such as a party) has begun. Party nuisance". It added that wifi protects privacy better than camera monitoring (which also requires constant monitoring), and wifi technology is much more effective than trying to monitor property in person.

Party Squasher products are designed to protect property, owners and guests in the short-term rental ecosystem. It is a product line of wifi innovator BlueZoo Inc. BlueZoo Inc is a technology company headquartered in Silicon Valley that provides traffic analysis products, including occupancy measurement.

BlueZoo's BlueFox product line provides solutions for the retail, hospitality, advertising and real estate industries.

Last year, Party Squasher launched Party Squasher Pro, a multi-property occupancy monitoring solution for short-term rental property management companies to introduce functions suitable for professional property managers.

BlueZoo Party Squasher CEO Bill Evans also participated in the STRz Trendsetters webinar in December 2020 to discuss how Airbnb's IPO will strengthen the supervision of the short-term rental industry in 2021.