Franzén founded Owegoo in 2013. The travel site stands out from the regular booking sites by focusing on what people want to do on a vacation instead of the location itself. By searching for different activities they would like to do on their trips, the site recommends possible locations. The rest of the travel planning process, such as booking accommodation and flights can also be managed through the service.

Even though Franzén resigns as CEO, she still remains board member of Owegoo. It is yet to be announced who takes over as CEO after the founder of the company.

“It is difficult to leave a company that one is passionate about, but i think it will be better for both me and Owegoo. In the last six months, I wondered whether I want to run a startup or not. I still think a lot about Owegoo, however I feel my talents are better suited at Drivhuset.” – explained Sofia Franzén to 8tillse.

The new CEO believes that Drivhuset plays an important role in the startup ecosystem of Malmö. The organisation provides education and a meeting place for young entrepreneurs-to-be. It is part of Drivhuset Sverige, an umbrella organization that has fourteen member organizations across the country. So far, the Malmö-based organization has helped over 1 000 new businesses to launch and held almost 4 000 coaching events.

“I can’t wait to see others realize their dreams and ideas. When I was offered this job, it felt just right.” – said Franzén to 8tillse.

Franzén has been deeply involved in the startup community of Malmö. Besides having founded her own startup, she is a board member of Malmö Startups and Young Entrepreneurs of Sweden, runs a weekly podcast about entrepreneurship and founded Women Founders Breakfast.

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Up until now the service included temperature and distance filters, which are quite general. But according to Sofia Franzén, Owegoo’s founder, giving users the opportunity to create their own filters, will allow Owegoo discover new niched areas of interest that they themselves wouldn’t come up with. This will make the service more unique and interesting.

In addition to the development of the new feature, the focus is on expansion. The site was released in December and it is also then became known that the company signed agreements with some of the world’s largest tour operators online: Expedia.com, Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Rentalcars.com.

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Owegoo is about simplifying how to book a travel ticket online. Instead of the usual booking sites, Owegoo is for those that do not know where they want to go to already – but rather want to explore where it could be fun to go to. All this, in a very beautiful and easy to use website. If you’re looking for adults only all inclusive resorts Maldives, consider the Avani Hotels that offers luxury villas.

“There are many great travel sites out there – perfect if you want to go to Paris on February the 8th. But what if you don’t know where you want to travel? Suddenly all the great travel booking and meta search sites become useless. Our aim is to change that.” says Sofia Franzén, founder and CEO.

“It has been shown that people end up using 9 different sites to find out where they could go. With Owegoo you can now instead do everything with a single site – explore destinations based on activities, and compare flights, hotels and rental cars.”

But in order to do this efficiently, a lot of partnerships with the right companies has been needed – something that now is in place. For the Owegoo team, adding hotels and rental cars is something that has been a part of the plan from the start. At the same time they are adding new currencies to the site so that more users can book in their own currency. The startup has now officially partnered up with Booking, Expedia, Hotels.com, Rentalcars, eDreams and eBooking.

“We are extremely happy to have partnered up with such important travel companies. These last months we’ve been working day and night to integrate all these new features to Owegoo ” says Sofia.

Owegoo Boutique Hotels

Another new feature launches is ‘Owegoo Boutique Hotels‘. These are hotels that have something extra that makes them stand out, and which visitors regard as something really special.

“These hotels are hotels that have ’it’. It could be a fantastic roof top terrace, nice details like a chocolate factory in the lobby or a hotel made by a world renowned architect.” says Sofia

This new feature is primarily for people that care about how they live when they travel, and that want to be able to search and find unique hotels in a quick and easy way. At launch ‘Owegoo Boutique Hotels’ covers some of the most amazing hotels out there, and the list of unique hotels will be increased over time.

“The Owegoo team are made of people who love to travel and discover new and inspiring places all over the world, and we realized that we so often get the question ‘Which hotel can you recommend?’, that we decided to build a feature where we could list our favorite hotels.”

Tons of Destinations & Activities around the world

But not only can we now see new features on the website, the website contains a lot of additional content since the launch in March.

“When we launched we had about 100 destinations and not more then 30 filters of activities. Since then we’ve been adding tons of new and inspiring locales and activities around the world. Users can now explore more then 800 destinations, each with their own travel guide, and explore these destinations by using more then 100 different activities filters.”

Chech out the travel site, read an interview with Sofia, or follow the blog.

The post Owegoo Partners Up With The World’s Largest Travel Companies appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Established entrepreneurs Hampus Jakobsson and Karl-Anders Johansson are the brilliant minds behind the new plot for having bought the property after receiving an expert property advice, and then turning it into an entrepreneur-house. The two have worked together in Tat, which they co-founded.

The 15th of January is moving-in day and renovations are currently in full swing Several of the companies moving in currently reside in Jard on Stora Nygatan 36.

According to Hampus Jakobsson, there’s no need to worry about bad blood between the rental owner of Stora Nygatan and the entrepreneur-duo. The move is purely in the interest of acquiring more space and the two have nothing but praise for their former location:

“The Jard building was too small, so we decided to find something new. But to anyone who is seeking a central facility of 200 square meters, Jard is super nice.”

The new entrepreneur-house is also the center for the start-up entrepreneur group Malmo Startups. The house includes ample meeting and recreation areas which Hampus Jakobsson believes is important to get business started.

We all know that the most defining characteristic of a house is its name, although Shakespeare might not agree, so what do they plan to call it?

“We don’t know yet, it’s tricky. Either we keep Jard or we come up with something new,” says Hampus Jakobsson.

We wish the two entrepreneurs and the twelve companies involved the best of luck and hope for a safe and hassle-free move!

Read more on the story at SydSvenskan.

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Giving insights

Most students eye the big companies as their future employer and a lot of the curriculum is to help students prepare for a life as an cubicle employee. How to start a startup is a series of lectures produced at Stanford (CS183B) in collaboration with the experts and founders from startups such as Facebook, Dropbox and AirBnB.

“The lectures are really great, and we combine that with our own experience, to give the students real life insights. And not just about how it is in the US, but how it is right here.” says Hampus Jakobsson

Hampus, being both a (very) busy business angel and serial entrepreneur, is one of the local entrepreneurs supporting it. Joel Larsson has been the person from the startup community that has been the most involved:

“We are happy that the university has been agreeing to host these events. We think it is a great way of getting more students into entrepreneurship” says Joel Larsson

The aim is to:

• Get students and successful entrepreneurs to meet & grow their network
• Learn how to come up with ideas, get customers, and raise money
• Discuss startup ideas and get feedback

Once a  week there will be lectures from the course, food and most importantly discussions about startup ideas with successful entrepreneurs from the region. Next week Philip from Unified Remote will be a guest, and talk about their experience from TC Disrupt. Other guests have been Linus Olsson from Flattr / Heml.is, and future guests include Alexandra Bylund from Newshubby / Foap and Sofia Franzén from Owegoo.

“Our aim is that students get a chance to meet successful entrepreneurs, broaden their network and get to know other with similar interests. It is also to get feedback and intros. This is similar to the Independence Day that we organised this spring, but this time as a series of lectures.” Joel continues.

ABOUT THE LECTURERS

Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, will be teaching the class How to Start a Startup (CS183B), along with guest lecturers like Marissa Mayer, Peter Thiel, and Ben Horowitz. They will be covering the fundamentals for startups: how to come up with ideas and evaluate them, how to acquire users and how to raise money.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

Student Innovation Center, Lund University LTH and Malmö Startups will be organizing the sessions. Malmö Startups is organized by entrepreneurs who would like to improve the local Startup ecosystem. It’s a non-profit that helps Students meet the local Startup Scene. Amongst them are Hampus Jakobsson and Joel Larsson.

WHEN & HOW?

The sessions are on Wednesdays 17:30 at LTH (E-1406) during October and November.

Register here and join the Facebook group to keep up to date with the latest news and discussion.

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Sofia, How did you get the idea to create Owegoo?

The idea of Owegoo grew from my own personal experience with traveling. Since I used to work with web stuff my computer was my office and I could not stand the cold winters in Sweden so I usually took off in November or December to go somewhere warmer and work from there. First I only went away for about a month, then the longest I have been gone was 6 month.

Planing those trips though was very complicated and it was difficult to find out information about the destination, such as their infrastructure, cost of living and so on. For example, in Asia it is cheaper to rent a hotel than an apartment. So I got really annoyed and after 2 to 3 years I got the idea for Owegoo.

What are you working on right now?

Adding lots of content to the site and measuring how people use the site.

What were the biggest obstacle to overcome with Owegoo?

The biggest challenge was to convince travel agencies of Owegoo before the site was even up. They had to sign a contract based on trust. But they also had a hard time to imagine that unconventional way of booking holidays. It took a long time to collect contracts with travel agencies and to collect flight data. Now it has become easier, since the site is up and travel agencies don’t have such a hard time to imagine what Owegoo is actually about.

How was Owegoo financed?

Owegoo has an Angel investor and is also financed by the ALMI government loan program.

How do you picture Owegoo in the future?

Right now the site is just small fragment of what it will be. I imagine to add a lot more content to the site, such as the possibility to book hotels, more filters, let users create filters and let them tell their stories about their trips, more flight data for the US, more language options and so on, to simply expand the web side to its full potential.

Thank you, Sofia, for sharing your thoughts with us. And good luck for the future.

The post Interview with Sofia Franzén CEO of Owegoo! appeared first on Øresund Startups.