Dear readers,
I just thought I would give you a quick update on our status.
To start with, let me give you an appetizer of the HouseTrip website (this is a screenshot of our homepage in its current state):
You may have noticed: the colors changed quite drastically from this blog! We think that light and peaceful colors like those are much better since our users (and especially the hosts) will spend quite some time on the website. As well, when looking at it, it makes you think about holiday much more than this blog’s original pink/red color. Sky blue, grass green and sandy yellow are likely to put everyone in a vacation mood! Very soon we will also update this blog with the new colors.
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Last Thursday in London took place the Techcrunch Europas award for Europe’s best start-ups. For 12 award categories, 50 start-ups were represented including 5 Swiss ones:
Poken
Big congratulations to all! Our fellow Swiss entrepreneurs also won some awards since Poken was elected “Best Real Life Gadget”, Amazee made it to the second place for “Best Social Innovation” and Amiando got a second place as well for “Best Web Application”.
The party was not only reserved to entrepreneurs: there were 2 investors’ awards. There again, a Swiss investor, Index Ventures, got a second place in the category “Best Investor”. Does it mean they invest more often? 
Let’s cross our fingers that HouseTrip makes it to the event next year!
You can also read about the event on TechCrunch, Amazee’s blog and Poken’s blog.
For the second consecutive year, the IFJ organized the Venture Summit event and this time HouseTrip was represented!
The concept: to take Switzerland’s “top” one-hundred people in the entrepreneurship field and send them for 24 hours in the nature. No sleep, lots of sport, drinking and extreme networking!
This year, we all went to the Jungfraujoch, in the middle of the Swiss Alps.
The Jungfrau summit
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The Theresienwiese area during the Oktoberfest
The Oktoberfest is the world’s largest fair with over 6 million attendees every year! It is traditionally (the Wiesn – as it is called locally – dates back to the early 1800’s) held for about 2 weeks from the end of September to early October. It is of course very famous for its beer (about 7 million litres of it are drunk at every Oktoberfest!) and food (about half a million chickens will be eaten during the fair ) but also for its popular attractions such as roller coasters. There are a lot of funny traditions around Oktoberfest: one that caught our attention is that every year a special beer mug is edited – a lot of people collect them like you can see on this website which displays Oktoberfest’s mugs from 1978 until now.
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View on gondolas while haveing breakfast at the Giudecca Mare Riva
This week we asked three hosts from Venice if they applied special booking conditions (rates, length of stay, etc.) during high and low demand periods for accomodation in the city. Below are their answers.
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