Hi everyone. Our Friday round-up is a bit late this week. Apologies and let’s get on with it – there have been some fascinating stories circulating the web this week!
You may remember reading in last week’s post about the tropical storm that devastated Guatemala, causing an extraordinary 200 foot sinkhole that swallowed an entire road junction in Guatemala City.
Pacaya volcano lava rivers
Now the Pacaya volcano has erupted, killing a reporter. The extraordinary lava rivers have been one of Guatamala’s premier tourist attractions for years, but they are now threatening to engulf nearby villages.
Fortunately, there is better news elsewhere in Guatemala. A commendable project called Maya Pedal is making manual tasks easier by providing locals with bicimáquinas (bicycles that power machines) which can grind corn, pump water and hull coffee beans. With no need for electricity, the initiative is eminently sustainable.
It’s one of several development projects that caught my attention this week. Another is a bizarre Read the whole post »
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 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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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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