The good folks at O’Reilly have given us a discount code on this year’s Etech conference in San Jose, beginning March 9th.

If you use the code “et09dopp” when you register, you’ll get 10% off!

I had the privilege of particpating in the programming committee for this year, and I think it is going to be fascinating, with one of the themes being very interesting to all of us to here at Dopplr: “City Tech“.

If you’re already going, remember to add your trip to Dopplr!

They’re being sent out now – you’ll get an entry in your Dopplr Journal, and an email both with a link to where you can download the report generated just for you.

Also, you’ll notice a new micro-feature – suggesting existing Dopplr users you might know.

We’ve generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It’s a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that we’re delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008.

To give you an example, we thought we’d show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who’s had a very busy 2008 – President Elect Barack Obama.

Download a PDF copy of Barack Obama’s 2008 Dopplr Personal Annual Report from http://dplr.it/obama-report

The main info-visualisation element of the report is the 2008 timeline, where we represent the trips you’ve taken throughout the year, pulling out the places you’ve stayed the longest and, where we can illustrating them with the Creative-Commons-licenced, Flickr-sourced photography we use on our new city pages.

Then, in the main body of the report there are a number of other things from your 2008 we try and surface, such as the fellow travellers that you coincide with most on your trips.

There’s the by-now-familiar Dopplr map of your travels which in Obama’s case tells a very interesting tale based on the shape of his campaign. You can see the perhaps-unusual whistlestop trips to Europe, the Middle-East, and Afghanistan – the barely-visible dots of which indicate the brevity of those stops.

Taking a closer look at the USA, the pattern of the campaign becomes more apparent. Larger circles correspond to battleground states during the campaign and other notable events can be seen, such as the visit made due to the sad illness and passing of Obama’s grandmother, registering as a circle over Hawaii.

As a man with strong views on climate-change, the environment and energy, the President-Elect will no doubt be very interested in the carbon estimate of his travels during the campaign as calculated by AMEE.

We’ve deliberately chosen a provocative visualisation here – a scale of the equivalent CO2 yearly output of Hummer SUVs to convey the estimate in concrete terms. Many of us after all would think very hard about driving such a vehicle, perhaps harder than we do about taking a flight.

While we imagine that few of you have had a year like Barack Obama’s we really hope you enjoy receiving your Personal Annual Report – look out for it in your email. As per usual, we’d love to hear what you think of it, and what reflections you have on your 2008 in travel.

P.s. We generated the Obama example from publically-available data on the Obama campaign as recorded by the Washington Post. As far as we know, Mr. Obama isn’t really a Dopplr user. Yet…

Acknowledgements:
The Dopplr Personal Annual Report was definitely inspired by things like The Day-to-Day Data Exhibition, Lucy Kimbell’s LIX project, Nicholas Felton’s annual reports and even, Schott’s Miscellany.

For Barack Obama’s timeline, we supplemented the city images with some excellent CC-Attribution licenced imagery from Flickr users Gongus, Matthias Winkelmann, Wendy Piersall, Spotbott and Beard Papa.

Phone and binoculars, originally uploaded by Matt Biddulph.

Since Marko, Matt B. and myself went to a cottage in Mundesley on the Norfolk Coast for a weekend, and cranked out the first prototype of Dopplr…

The final five, originally uploaded by moleitau.

No, not Cylons, but Dopplr-powered Moo Stickerbooks. I’ve just put the last five we had in envelopes to the last five people who asked for them…

Yep, we’re sorry to say that we’ve run out of the limited run that we made for dConstruct back in September, so if you would still like to get stickers made from Dopplr data, and even better your Dopplr data – we recommend you head on over to the excellent Mooplr for now.

Stay tuned in the new year for brand-spanking new digital/physical freshness powered by Dopplr…

Yesterday we launched our new city pages.

We’ve had city pages as collections of information and tips for Dopplr users for over a year, and now we’re made those pages public to the internet: the first stage in creating what we’re calling a “Social Atlas” internally.

A few weeks ago we mailed everyone who had contributed a tip to Dopplr and asked if they would prefer to keep what they had posted private to only Dopplr members, and we’re happy to say no-one chose to – so the collective intelligence of Dopplr is available to everyone on the web to help them travel smarter.

Of course, this works both ways, and we hope of course that more people find Dopplr this way and choose to participate to make our social atlas more comprehensive.

Here’s an example of our new public tips pages: tips tagged “breakfast” in San Francisco:

From which I can find a hidden gem like the one Yoz suggests:

So that’s the useful stuff, but perhaps the most noticeable, eyecatching thing about the new pages is the inclusion of Creative-Commons-licenced photography of the world’s cities powered by Flickr.

We’ve curated a small collection of CC-attribution-sharealike licenced photos from Flickr Places, and then superimposed a graph of Dopplr traveller activity, added some interesting factoids like where most people travel to and from that city and hey presto!

We’re pleased as punch with them, and especially happy to be able to support the Creative Commons in a small way. Many thanks to our friends there and at Flickr for their assistance in putting this together.

It was fascinating to work through thousands of amazing images to select them for the city pages. We created a small tool internally to help speed up this task, which we’ll write a separate more technical post about later.

We’re far from having an image for everywhere on Earth, but we’ll be adding more every week.

One other interesting side-effect of creating the public city pages was that we had to make public pages for the whole geographical hierarchy of our ’social atlas’.

So, we now have ‘place’ pages for countries and all of the USA’s states.

And, I find these pages fascinating! I’ve not been able to stop clicking around them in the same way that I could pore over an atlas when I was a child. You keep turning up things like this:

And my favourite:

I think Funafuti might be my new favourite place…

What’s yours? Go explore!

Celia’s our Community Design Manager at Dopplr, and many of you may have heard from her when you have a problem or a query about the service.

But, the main part of her job is to take that feedback and use it as a basis for designing new and improved ways for you to use Dopplr.

She’s behind the recent update to one of mainstays of the Dopplr interface – the Traveller Overview.

To mark the redesign, I asked her to write a little about the process of coming up with the new interface.

Over to Celia:

The original impetus behind reworking these pages came from the fact that we’d just launched public profiles. We wondered how much of that thinking we could share with the old page, which had essentially stayed the same since we first launched in 2007.

It started off with the idea that we could make the journal the default tab (rather than Trips) and put some of the modules from the public profile, such as future trips, in a side column of the same page.

One idea that came from that discussion was that we should highlight travel coincidences more, as they’re at the heart of Dopplr. It was suggested that we tag or highlight them in some way, which led to thinking that we could group them and push them to the top of the page. We could group them together as we were already doing on trip pages, so people could easily see who was near them “in time and space”.

The result, as you’ll see, is a page which devotes the top left to to coincidences, the bottom left to the journal (a more comprehensive view of activity on your Dopplr account), and the right hand side to future trips.

We also wanted to make sure that the page worked for new users, or people who hadn’t yet added any trips or fellow travellers. The page they see is focussed on adding trips and making connetions to other people.

To make the navigation work, we created a tab for this page and called it “Overview”. To make it fit, we needed to rework the tab structure a little, while keeping some of the familar features that existing users expected to find.

As part of this work, we also created a new view in the “Your trips” tab that allows you to see your past trips.

Up till now there hadn’t been a good way of doing this: you could navigate via the Journal or use the Carbon tab, but neither were really satisfactory. People would often ask us for a view of their past trips, so it’s something we’re very pleased to have built.

Thanks to Celia for that insight into the process, and of course, all her hard work on the redesign.

We still want to do lots more to make Dopplr clearer, easier and more delightful to use, but I’m really glad that we’re starting to get more ways into browsing past trips. While we’re trying to provide a tool for smarter travel focussed on optimising your future, it’s really pleasurable to look back over where you’ve been and see photos and facts about the trip. Looking forward to doing more on that side of Dopplr.

As ever, we’re looking forward to hearing what you think about the new design.

DOPPLR: Web 2.0 Expo Europe 2008, originally uploaded by moleitau.

is filling up nicely.

The map of where people have come from is fascinating.

If you’re at the event and want to join in the group page can be found here.

As we head out of the summer (or whatever passed for it here in London) we thought it was time to take another of our semi-regular looks at where we’re headed for the rest of the year.

This time around, instead of just plotting the popular destinations, which don’t change significantly from season-to-season – we’d try and surface the outliers.

That is, the extraordinary places that have attracted significant numbers of people from the beginning of September til the end of November.

To do this, we used a property of our database we call excitement, which the other Matt – MattB – can tell you all about, in his by-now-traditional “here comes the science bit”:

When we set out to summarise the travel outlook for the end of 2008, we wanted to do more than just list destinations by simple popularity. As frequent travellers we’re interested in what’s off the beaten path: the anomalies in travel patterns as well as the hubs.

To do this, we created a metric that compares activity in a location over a time period to the average activity there. For each active trip destination, we look at its six-month history to see how many trips have gone there and how many travellers live there.

We then divide one by the other. This means that centres of travel like London, Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo get a relatively low score, and places that are suddenly popular will spring to the top of the list.

And the top-ten destinations in terms of excitement this Autumn, are as follows:

• Black Rock City, NV, United States
• Mandelieu, France
• Linz, Austria
• Tianjin, China
• Riva del Garda, Italy
• Isle of Wight, United Kingdom
• Brighton, United Kingdom
• Ródos, Greece
• Camden, ME, United States
• Osaka, Japan

While we can only speculate on why some of these cities are so popular this autumn, we’re pretty certain why Black Rock City’s at the top of the list.

This is of course because it is a city that only exists for a certain time, once a year for Burning Man. A temporary community that constructs itself, that gets mapped by that community, and now tops our social atlas of the Fall. Perfect!

Thanks to everyone who filled in our traveller survey recently. We were bowled-over by the responses, and fascinated by some of the trends we uncovered, for instance: when travellers tell Dopplr about their travel plans, two-thirds of them have not yet booked a hotel and half have not yet made any travel arrangements.

This is encouraging, as it shows that you’re really using Dopplr to optimise the future, and travel smarter – which is why we built it!

We got a lot of constructive criticism and suggestions also, of things that bug you, or things you’d like to see Dopplr provide – and we’re going to be writing a series of responses here on the blog over the autumn.

Many, many thanks to you all – one of the best things about helping build Dopplr is receiving feedback from passionate users. Remember we’ve got our Get Satisfaction Dopplr forum for you to contribute to also.

But, back to the autumn outlook.

As I said – the top destinations don’t change that much from season to season, as you might expect with the majority of our travel being for business; but we thought it might be revealing to segment the top destinations by continent.

Top ten destination cities for travellers from Europe
1. London, United Kingdom
2. Berlin, Germany
3. New York, NY, United States
4. Paris, France
5. Amsterdam, Netherlands
6. San Francisco, CA, United States
7. Munich, Germany
8. Brighton, United Kingdom
9. Barcelona, Spain
10. Stockholm, Sweden

Top ten destination cities for travellers from Asia
1. London, United Kingdom
2. Singapore, Singapore
3. Tokyo, Japan
4. Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China
5. Beijing, China
6. New York, NY, United States
7. San Francisco, CA, United States
8. Paris, France
9. Bangkok, Thailand
10. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Top ten destination cities for travellers from North America
1. New York, NY, United States
2. San Francisco, CA, United States
3. London, United Kingdom
4. Chicago, IL, United States
5. Las Vegas, NV, United States
6. Los Angeles, CA, United States
7. Washington, DC, United States
8. Boston, MA, United States
9. Paris, France
10. Atlanta, GA, United States

Top ten destination cities for travellers from Africa:
1. London, United Kingdom
2. New York, NY, United States:
3. Amsterdam, Netherlands
4. Geneva, Switzerland
5. Dubai, United Arab Emirates
6. Lisbon, Portugal
7. Paris, France
8. Cape Town, South Africa
9. Boston, MA, United States
10. Nairobi, Kenya

Top ten destination cities for travellers from South America
1. Buenos Aires, Argentina
2. Sao Paulo, Brazil
3. New York, NY, United States
4. Santiago, Chile
5. London, United Kingdom
6. Paris, France
7. San Francisco, CA, United States
8. Madrid, Spain
9. Montevideo, Uruguay
10. Miami, FL, United States

Top ten destination cities for travellers from Oceania
1. London, United Kingdom
2. Sydney, Australia
3. Melbourne, Australia
4. Singapore, Singapore
5. Perth, Australia
6. Brisbane, Australia
7. Auckland, New Zealand
8. San Francisco, CA, United States
9. Tokyo, Japan
10. New York, NY, United States

That wraps up this traveller outlook – wherever you’re headed this autumn, safe travels from all of The Dopplr Team.

Over the summer we’ve been working hard to create Groups on Dopplr.

There will be a few stages to this, and the first we’re ready to introduce is the groups feature for companies and corporations, which we launched at dConstruct08.

^ image by Matt Locke

Overall – groups are a way to share trips with people who might not be in your Dopplr network yet, but would share a common interest around the trips you place in those groups. Specifically, in this first stage of our roll-out of groups, that common interest equates to the companies we work for.

What do I mean?

Well – imagine the trip as a “social object” you can place into a group for anyone who is a member of that group to see. For instance, say I worked for SuperDuperBigCo, and was going on a business trip to Tokyo.

Everyone in my Dopplr network would see the trip as per usual – but if I chose to place the trip in the SuperDuperBigCo group then anyone in the group could see it, including members of the group who I don’t share trips with currently.

So, coincidences with other SuperDuperBigCo staff who have placed their trips to Toyko in the group would be highlighted to me, even if I don’t yet share trips with that colleague.

Discovering someone else from my company is going to be there might make my trip more productive, more fun – or both!

It might even mean I change my trip to make it more valuable if I was going on company business, or, in some cases it might mean I discover I don’t have to travel at all.

We think that company groups are a pretty powerful tool for optimising travel.

You certainly don’t have to put every trip into a group, for instance, personal trips; but you can opt to make placing a trip into a group or groups your default setting – which might save you time if most of your travel is on company business.

The group ‘home’ has an overview of the individual activity and trips placed with the group, and also has some other interesting features based on the aggregate behaviour of the group.

For instance: group carbon (calculated by aggregating information from those in the group who have declared their carbon profile sharable), a ‘raumzeitgeist’ view of the group’s travels, an upcoming trip activity ’seismograph’ and a historical chart of top destinations of the group.

We’ll be adding more features and data-toys over time. If there’s anything you think would be particularly useful to you as a group, do let us know on our Get Satisfaction Forum.

Here’s a screenshot of our (i.e. Dopplr Ltd’s) group home.

You might have received a message from us over the weekend if you’re registered with Dopplr with an email address belonging to one of the companies we’ve created a group for.

The initial list of companies is below – we’ve based it on the Dopplr100 list that we created last year, but if your company would like a group, let us know.

When you visit the company group page, we’ll ask you to verify you have a valid email address belonging to the company.

Don’t worry if your Dopplr account isn’t registered with that email address – as long as you can receive a validation code at your company email address it’s fine.

More on groups in the coming weeks… Stay tuned!

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