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 hotel that’s just opened (and closed) on Capocotta beach in Rome as part of Corona’s “Save the Beach” campaign.

Save the Beach hotel, Rome

We’ve all been to rubbish hotels, but not many of us have been to a hotel constructed almost solely from garbage. Model Helena Christensen was the first visitor.

Lastly, paint company Dulux has just released a stunning global film for its Let’s Colour project, which is literally brightening the lives of people in grey urban areas around the world. Volunteers and locals are shown in super fast-forward as they cover huge expanses of brickwork in brilliant colour.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The new iPhone 4G was officially unveiled this week, although the launch was something of an anti-climax after tech site Gizmodo got their hands on a copy a few weeks ago.

If you can’t wait to get your hands on one, you could always pick up an Ai Feng in China. The new knock off version is already doing the rounds in Shanghai, where the World Expo is going strong.

This Expo will probably be remembered for the enormous queues for the popular pavilions. Visitors are recommended to join the queues two hours before doors open, to have any chance of getting in.

After all that queuing, you might want to steer clear of KFC – a recent survey has surprisingly revealed that KFC is twice as popular as McDonalds in China.

Of course, if you’re not one for queues, you could follow the strategy of this lady at Dallas Fort Worth airport, who wasn’t in the mood for hanging around.

Click here to view the embedded video.

France has surprisingly emerged as the most expensive place to take a holiday in a recent Skyscanner poll. UK consumers mistakenly believed that the Nordic countries, Dubai and Japan would be the most expensive, whereas France and Switzerland actually topped the list.

Switzerland sure ain’t cheap, but I’m not sure how France came top. Lucky you can save money with a holiday apartment in Paris (shameless plug!).

One man who knows the price of a holiday is Tony Woodley. As the latest in the series of BA strikes disrupted flights for thousands of passengers, the UNITE union leader jetted off to Cyprus – with easyJet!

He’ll be joining thousands of the worst dressed holidaymakers in Europe, although we can only speculate whether he’ll be joining the current British Speedos epidemic which is affecting beaches worldwide.

We’ll finish with two of the strangest stories I noticed this week.

First, a Romanian jobseeker breached security at Vienna airport and hid himself in the undercarriage of a plane owned by the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. He remarkably survived temperatures of -41C during the flight to London…where he was promptly detained and sent home.

On the other side of the world, the only pub in the hottest place in Australia has just shut down, forcing many locals into a 150 mile pilgrimage across the Outback to the nearest local.

Just goes to show that Australians really don’t give a XXXX about anything else.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.’”

The day started around a breakfast in a meeting room next to VentureLab’s offices. The venture leaders were meeting each other for the first time and everyone was curious about the others’ projects: I started speaking with Friedrich, the CEO of MedDrop Technologies. What they are trying to commercialize is rather impressive: if I understood correctly, they developed a technology that allows the injection of substances in the body with minimal invasion (no needle, etc.). They work for instance with old race-horses unable to race anymore due to disfunctioning joints: they just spray some substance on the horse’s knees and the substance somehow makes its way to the bone and rebuilds the horse’s cartilage! Some horses even won races again!

After the breakfast, each member had to present his “coat of arms” which he had prepared ahead of the day. The template we had to use is below:

The way the venture leaders introduced themselves

After this small presentation we spoke through a Skype video conference to Pascal Marmier who is the consul of Swissnex in Boston (you can read his interesting profile here on the MIT Sloan School’s website) and who will kindly be welcoming us there. He described a bit further the very exciting program which awaits the venture leaders in Boston: networking with the local start-up scene, individual coaching by teachers of the Babson college, meeting with investors, etc.

It was time for food so we all headed to another part of the university in order to have a networking lunch with the attendants of the conference to which we would participate.

Before lunch we each had received a Poken, which is a small device through which you connect with new friends across social networks when and where you meet them. Cool things!  On the left you can see my Poken: I chose a Panda It is quite practical: since everyone at the conference had one and since I connected with the Poken to everyone I spoke to, I ended up having a lot of new friends on my social networks when I came back home Friday evening!

As you can check on the program of the conference, the speakers were mostly experienced actors of the start-up scene. Stéphane Doutriaux (you can watch an interview of him here), the founder of Poken, was especially interesting to listen to because he was member of the 2008 start-up team and his venture is a huge success. He explained during 40 fascinating minutes all the steps he went through to get where he is now.

Neil Rimer was also fascinating to listen to: he was historically one of the first European VCs with Index Ventures and is at the origin of fantastic success stories such as Skype and Last.fm He spoke about start-ups from a VC perspective: what he is looking for, what is the perfect team, etc. I of course was trying to mentally check if all his investment criteria were matching HouseTrip and was pretty happy with my mental result

All in all it was a great day and I feel very lucky to be offered such a chance!

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.

The day of the presentation arrived: the 13th of January 2009! The presentation lasted 20 minutes, went well and we were told that we would receive the results within the next 24 hours.

Great news: one day later, we received the following email:

“We are pleased to inform you that your venture pitch has been selected for support by venture kick: you will receive CHF 10’000 to develop your business idea.“

In addition the CHF10’000, we also won a 2-day “kickers camp” during which Jordi Montserrat and Beat Schillig, the founders of VentureKick, would coach us on the project. HouseTrip benefited greatly from the entire VentureKick experience: it forced us to think about all aspects of the business and to synthesize the idea in our minds.

We now look forward to VentureKick’s second stage on the 13th of May 2009!

Venture Leaders

Another contest organized by the VentureKick team, Venture Leaders grants its winners (20 each year) with a 10-day stay in Boston as members of the “Swiss National Start-Up Team”, during which they get coached by teachers of the Babson College and interact with local actors of the start-up field (mostly entrepreneurs and investors).

HouseTrip was one out of 40 projects selected to present on the 19th of March 2009 among approximately 100 applications.

After much suspense, a couple of days after the presentation we received an email came with the title : “venture leaders 2009: you’re in the team!“:

“CONGRATULATIONS! You belong to the winners of the «venture leaders» Prize 2009! You can definitely book your agenda from June 9th to June 19th and prepare for an exciting experience into the entrepreneurial world in Boston.“

Interesting is to have a look at what Paul Sevinç wrote about his experience as a jury member this day.

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!

Since we didn’t know much about Scotland, it would have been nice for us to choose from B&Bs based on their characteristics: close to a lake, in the nature, double-bed, convenient parking, for instance. But we could only click on a specific location and then basically go through each single B&B in that area only.

Finally, because we had heard of it, we decided on the Fort William area and searched in that specific place.

For those of you who already booked a B&B somewhere, you probably know that you have to contact the B&B owners in order to book, direct booking (as we know it with hotels) doesn’t exist. So we started sending out emails and after several days of back and forth communications with several owners, we finally had our Saturday night booked in Fort William!

The big day had come and we merrily drove from Edinburgh through the beautiful Scottish countryside all the way to Fort William where we arrived around 10pm.

Queen's view, next to Pitlochry

The hostess was very nice because, even though we hadn’t confirmed our room during the day (we had totally forgotten to do that!), she had still kept it for us. If you don’t experience such nice hospitality, either remember to confirm your arrival during the day or wait for HouseTrip’s release for direct booking .

Scotland was an amazing experience and its beautiful landscape certainly inspired me greatly for the HouseTrip idea.

Renting out a flat in Lausanne

The second event that helped me shape the HouseTrip idea was when we tried to rent out our place in Lausanne for the month of July. In order to do so, we went to all those “classified ads” websites and posted our property. We limited ourselves to the few ones that are free for posting. The problem we experienced with those free websites was to make our place stand out: to actually show potential guests that it was a nice place to stay at!

Vineyards by the Leman lake, a few minutes away from our place

With only a few small pictures allowed and a field for free text, it was not very easy. In addition to that, our house posting was lost in a long list of other properties: it is almost by coincidence that potential guests find your property, we were thinking… In the end, we only received few enquiries which unfortunately never worked out and thus our place remained empty for the month of July… Sob…

Back in the car: the HouseTrip idea!

And there, back in my car at the border in Dover, I got the HouseTrip idea!

A website that focuses on short-term rentals and which will make the rental process finally fun and convenient for both guests and hosts! When the idea was at the very spark in my mind, I remember picturing many images: a map with a lot of properties tagged on it, an online chat between an owner and a tenant, a “book it now” button, etc. Funny how some mental images stay: they are still in my mind today and I often somehow refer to them – to the original HouseTrip vision – when I need to.

Back in the car, I was trying to arrange my thoughts and to reflect on what HouseTrip could encompass:

• A revenue management system? Yes, so that the rental prices are actually adapted to the demand, inexpensive when the demand is low, more expensive when many people want to stay in a property!
• A great search function so that tenants can find the one property suitable for them? Of course!
• A property profile page? With HouseTrip, hosts will be able to describe their place in as much depth as they want and make it stand out.
• What about direct booking? Yes, like that it is as easy and simple as booking a hotel.
• What about some social features? So that HouseTrip users can give tips to each other and develop a community around the only real way to discover a place: sleep at the locals’ homes!

I was so excited in my car that I genuinely was driving at about 10 miles an hour on the highway, absorbed in my thoughts!

The day I got the HouseTrip idea: picture taken on the boat between Dover and France

A new post follows this one, you can see it here.