Dear readers,
I just wanted to introduce a startup located only a few minutes drive away from HouseTrip in Lausanne, Switzerland. We find their services pretty awesome so we wanted to share it with you.
RouteRANK is a software solution for travel planning. Unlike other solutions that consider only one means of transport at a time, routeRANK addresses the entire travel route by integrating rail, road and air connections. In a single search, routeRANK’s technology finds and ranks the best possible travel routes, allowing users to sort them according to their priorities such as price, travel time and CO2 emissions.
RouteRANK also offers custom developed versions of its proprietary software to corporate customers and organizations, for their internal use or use on their own website, in travel and logistics.
The routeRANK public website illustrates one fully functioning version of the software. Although here the focus is on European travel, airports and flight connections outside Europe are integrated. A widget is freely available for those who wish to easily integrate this routeRANK functionality to their own website.
Do go and test RouteRANK on their website. My guess is you’ll be pretty amazed at how detailed they can calculate a route for you!
Arnaud
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 Swiss National Start-Up Team (I am in the top right corner, second from left
I just come back from a great 10-day trip in Boston with the other winners of the “Venture Leaders” competition which together constitute the “Swiss National Start-Up Team”.
The program, prepared by VentureLab and Swissnex Boston (the consulate of Switzerland lead by Pascal Marmier), was really what every entrepreneur can dream to have for his project. Check this: workshops with high-profile entrepreneurs, coaching sessions by teachers of the Babson College, successful start-ups visits, negotiation trainings, networking sessions with investors, pitch competitions, etc.
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Proudly wearing my new polo
This Friday, the 20 start-up projects composing the 2009 Swiss National Start-Up Team spent the day together at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Apparently Switzerland seems to be the only country in the world to have a national start-up team, if we are to believe this swiss blog, and it is certainly an example to follow for other countries: thanks to initiatives like that, Switzerland manages to be world champion in terms of top startups per capita (28 Swiss projects in the Red Herring top 100)! In this interview on the Microsoft Startup Zone website, Beat Schillig, “Mr. Entrepreneurship” in Switzerland, speaks a bit further about the concept:
“During the last five years, we had more than 30,000 participants attend our networking events and more than 8,000 entrepreneurs in our ‘venturelab’ workshops. The ‘venturelab’ is the governmental training program of CTI, the Swiss Promotion Agency for Innovation, which is run by our organization. And out of this crowd we select 20 ‘venture leaders’ each year – we call them our ‘Swiss national startup team.’”
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This post follows a previous one that you can read there.
You can ask most entrepreneurs (well, at least those who start with no financial means): looking for financing is not an easy job, even when you have a great idea!
How did we manage to gather the initial investment for HouseTrip? First of all I think it is a question of speaking about the project and your need of financing to as many people around you as you can: the fear that an idea might be « stolen » if you do so is largely overrated and, in our humble view, should not restrain you. There is simply no coherent reason for it to happen: it would make the « thief » compete 100% with you on an idea you have ruminating in your mind for much longer than him/her… The only risk would be that the idea reaches another start-up or a company in the same field as yours but they would still have to decide to run with your idea (or part of it) and therefore eventually change theirs… Unlikely.
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This post follows a previous one which you can read there.
VentureKick
January 2009, a huge milestone for HouseTrip: VentureKick, the most prestigious entrepreneurship contest in Switzerland in the domain of technologies. The competition works in 3 stages: 4 projects win the first stage (and it gives them the right to participate to the second stage), 2 projects will pass the second stage and only 1 will ultimately receive the third stage’s prize, CHF100′000. We had applied to VentureKick back in November 2008 and learned in December that our project was one of the 8 selected (out of approximately 30) to present in front of the jury for the first stage.
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This post follows a previous one, which you can read there.
Back at home in Lausanne, I literally spent 6 months speaking about the HouseTrip idea to everyone I met. I wanted to check that it wasn’t something I was getting excited about on my own, that it was actually something people needed. It was a great feeling and it gave me confidence that everyone saw a lot of potential in the idea.
Junjun and Arnaud
On the way I had of course shared the idea with my girlfriend Junjun who, to my great delight, agreed that we should both dedicate ourselves fully to the project after we would finish our studies in January 2009 (we were both studying hospitality and tourism management at the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne).
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Welcome to the HouseTrip blog!
We thought it would be interesting to launch the blog with a series of posts about our short history: “where it all began” starts at the very beginning, the birth of the HouseTrip idea!
I remember exactly when and why I got the idea for HouseTrip: Junjun and I were driving from London to Lausanne (Switzerland), the car completely packed with all the stuff we had accumulated during the 7-month internship in the City of London and I was thinking about those two events, which – I didn’t know – would change my life.
Finding a Bed and Breakfast (B&B) in Scotland
The first event I was thinking about was when I tried to find a nice B&B for a weekend in Scotland: it doesn’t seem like much of a life-changing event but bear with us
Eilean Donan Castle - Beautiful Scotland!
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