I’m writing this from the second afternoon of the Future of Web Apps conference in London. It’s been great to see so many developers, designers and entrepreneurs come together from across Europe.

If you’re an attendee, we’ve made you a Future of Web Apps ‘08 Dopplr group that you can join and use to see where everyone came from, share tips on London and share your travels with new contacts from the conference after you leave.

I gave a talk on the first afternoon, on the developer track. Entitled “Dopplr: made of messages”, it’s an overview of how we use message queue technology on our servers and why it’s so useful to developers when building scalable web systems. Here are the slides, complete with notes. Do get in touch if you’re a developer and would like to discuss the topic in more depth.

Several of the Dopplr team are in Amsterdam today to attend the Picnic ‘08 conference. Look out for us, and get yourself some of our new stickers.

At 4.20pm on Wednesday, Matt Jones is speaking on a panel entitled
The Emerging Real-Time Social Web.

Update: here are the slides from Matt’s talk on the panel

“With ubiquitous internet connections and a surge of connected mobile services, slices of reality can be saved that people could not capture before. Saving and sharing our presence, we can feel those of others as well. We are on the verge of a reality with ‘social peripheral vision’, in which ambient friendships flourish and life stories and life’s details are stored, shared and searchable.”

Linda Stone is moderating the panel. We were delighted to read rthat a Dopplr coincidence with Linda was a factor in danah boyd finding an exciting new job at Microsoft R&D. A lovely example of the
Brave New World of Digital Intimacy.

If you’re travelling to the conference, you might like to join the Dopplr Picnic ‘08 group we’ve created for the event. Add your trip, see where everyone has come from, share tips on Amsterdam, and use the member list to keep in touch after you leave.

Today we’re announcing a new round of funding at Dopplr. We’re very excited about this news. For the details, here’s our press release in full:

International group led by Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé and Thomas Glocer invests in online service for sharing travel intentions

London and Helsinki, 16 September 2008 – Dopplr, the online service for smarter travel, has announced a second financing round from a group of prominent international investors — all users of the service. The funding will be used to expand the service globally from its strong base in Europe.

The new investors include Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé, Thomas Glocer, Yat Siu, Aditya dev Sood, Lars Hinrichs, Joshua Schachter, Brian Behlendorf, Ami Hasan, Daniel Sachs, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Kim Weckström, and Azeem Azhar. Saul Klein, who invested in this round, also invested in the previous round together with Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman and Joichi Ito.

Lead investor Esther Dyson, a frequent traveller across four continents, recently discussed Dopplr and new Web business models in The Wall Street Journal: “I’m an individual with specific travel plans, which I intentionally make visible to my preferred vendors. […] Value is being created in users’ own walled gardens, which they will cultivate for themselves in real estate owned by the social networks. The new value creators are companies – like Facebook and Dopplr—that know how to build and support online communities.”

Intention sharing and brands

“Dopplr is leading the way in intention sharing services online. It is valuable to know where your trusted friends and colleagues will be, and where you could meet them next,” said Lisa Sounio, CEO of Dopplr. “Partner brands on Dopplr will also give you relevant information and offers tailored to you. For example, when you tell Dopplr your plans to go to Hong Kong, you might get the latest intelligence from Monocle and offers from boutique hotels picked by Mr and Mrs Smith.”

Dopplr users, the world’s most frequent travellers from over 190 countries, made on average more than 10 trips in the last year. This fall they will visit 5431 cities with the top destinations being London, New York, San Francisco, Paris and Berlin. Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai and Dubai are all in the top 50 Dopplr destination cities. 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. (Source: Dopplr Fall Travel Outlook 2008)

“We see the opportunity to go well beyond building a simple web-based community with Dopplr,” says Monocle Editor-In-Chief and Dopplr Investor Tyler Brûlé. “There’s considerable scope to use Dopplr to improve the travel experience for all by engaging in discussions with not only our members but also travel brands and government agencies seeking informed opinions.”

About Dopplr

Dopplr is the online service for smarter travel. Dopplr helps you make the most of your trips by sharing your travel plans with the people and brands you trust. The service then highlights coincidences, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Tokyo when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer or mobile phone. It links with many popular online calendars and social networks.

After a period of exclusive availability to selected global companies, Dopplr opened to world travellers everywhere in December 2007. With offices on London’s silicon roundabout and the Helsinki seaside, Dopplr was founded by CTO Matt Biddulph, Design Director Matt Jones, CEO Lisa Sounio and Dan Gillmor. Marko Ahtisaari is a founding investor.

Notes to editors

For more information or to schedule an interview please contact:

Lisa Sounio +358(0)405100691
press@dopplr.com

Matt Biddulph, Matt Jones and Lisa Sounio will be available for interviews in London on Tuesday 16th September.

For more information about Monocle please contact:

Emily Smith +44(0)2077254343
es@monocle.com

Investor URLs:
Esther Dyson – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Dyson (on Dopplr: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/esthr )
Tom Glocer – http://tomglocer.com/
Tyler Brûlé – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Br%C3%BBl%C3%A9
Yat Siu – http://outblaze.com/main.php?id=about&page=about_exe#yat
Saul Klein – http://localglobe.blogspot.com/
Aditya dev Sood – http://www.cks.in/html/company_htmls/cks_people01.html
Lars Hinrichs – http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Hinrichs
Azeem Azhar – http://azeemazhar.wordpress.com/
Joshua Schachter – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Schachter
Brian Behlendorf – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Behlendorf
Joshua Ramo – http://www.joshuaramo.com/

We’ve added another way to get your trips into your Dopplr. If you check your Calendars and Events account page you’ll now see the option to associate your Dopplr account with your Upcoming account. After you do that, we’ll scan your Upcoming regularly and add trips for any event you’ve marked as Attending — as long as it’s outside your home city.

We’ll remember that the trip came from Upcoming and display a link to the event page wherever we show the trip. You can see this right now on my public profile on my trip to Amsterdam to attend the Picnic conference.

Don’t forget you can also use the same account page to subscribe to internet-connected calendars like Google Calendar, and to push calendars from clients like Apple iCal.

Yesterday I asked what a particular list of English words had in common. Here’s the answer:

Mobile, AL, United States | Page, ND, United States | Nice, France | For, Norway | Name, Mozambique | Union, Philippines | Best, Netherlands | Dollar, United Kingdom | Tours, France | Split, Croatia | Accident, MD, United States | Mile, Tanzania | List, Germany | Central, SC, United States | Deal, NJ, United States | Deposit, NY, United States | Trip, Romania | This, France | Back, United Kingdom | Carry, Haiti | Center, MO, United States | Start, Russia | Kilo, Finland | Purchase, NY, United States | Transfer, PA, United States | Goès, France | Plan, Spain | Media, PA, United States | Sale, Australia | Downtown, PA, United States | Fully, Switzerland | Luck, WI, United States | Normal, IL, United States | Comfort, TX, United States | Call, MO, United States | Local, MO, United States

Every one of these words occurs often in emails sent by the travel industry. And every word is also the name of a place somewhere in the world. Congratulations to commenter Smyles yesterday for guessing most of the connection.

The reason these words are important to us is that they are the “stop” list we use to filter emails before trying to interpret trip information from them. Without this list, we’d see a phrase like “accident insurance” or “for your comfort” and offer you trips to the towns of Accident, For or Comfort.

Quick quiz: what do the following words have in common?

mobile, page, nice, for, name, union, best, dollar, tours, split, accident, mile, list, central, deal, deposit, trip, this, back, carry, center, start, kilo,
purchase, transfer, goes, plan, media, sale, downtown, fully, luck, normal, comfort, call, local

Here’s a clue:

Check back tomorrow for the answer.

Congratulations to our friends at Yahoo Brickhouse. This week they’ve launched Fire Eagle, “an open platform that helps users take their location to the Web while giving them the ability to easily control how and where their location data is shared.”

By registering for an account, you can use a variety of websites, phones, devices and services to tell Fire Eagle where you are right now. Naturally Dopplr is one such application. If you enable Fire Eagle on your Dopplr account then we’ll publish a location update to Fire Eagle once a day, just when you’re travelling.

Once Fire Eagle knows where you are, you can authorise other services to access that information and do things for you using it. At Wikinear you can access wikipedia pages chosen based on where you are in the world. outside.in can send you news alerts about what’s happening in your current neighbourhood. You can publish your location in a sidebar on your blog with the Movable Type plugin. And if you change your mind, you have complete control over the level of detail the applications can access, and can revoke the permission at any time.

Because Fire Eagle is an open platform, anyone who wants to code an application can get a developer account and create a new location-aware service without having to worry about whether you’ll be updating it with an iPhone, a laptop or your Dopplr itinerary. We’re big fans of this modular approach and think it’s the next step in the evolution of the web. Dopplr itself uses the services of many 3rd-party applications, whether it’s our Facebook app, our import of trips from Google Calendars or Upcoming events, social network import from LinkedIn or Gmail, or all the places we use Google Maps and Flickr Photos to give you better information on your trips.

There are several places in Dopplr where we work hard behind the scenes to turn information that makes sense to people into data that makes sense to machines.

The most important one is where we interpret places and dates and turn them into trips. This is harder than it sounds, because over the centuries people have evolved an astonishing variety of ways of referring to place and time.

This was important recently when we launched our new SMS, Twitter and email features. We get quite a few requests for an explanation of how they work, so here’s a little insight.

The key to Dopplr’s ‘intelligence’ is learning from you and your fellow travellers over time.

For example, let’s say you’ve just joined Dopplr. You type ‘Paris’ into the Add A Trip form, and we look at the history of everyone’s trips from the last 18 months of our database and conclude that 99% of the time, that means “Paris, France”. However, if you’ve been using Dopplr for a while then we also look back at your own trip history. If you’ve previously been on a trip to “Paris, Texas” then that’s the default we’ll choose.

So the more trips you go on, the better we get to know you.

Incidentally, this ‘popularity content’ ranking of places has led to some lovely map visualisations and interesting statistics. If you haven’t seen them before, do look back in our blog at our Raumzeitgeist and Mid-2008 Travel Outlook posts.

When we’re scanning emails, twitters and text messages, we’ve got a few more factors to interpret. This time we’re looking for the dates of your trip as well as the place. We start with some complicated pattern matching which can spot a wide range of date formats in any prose it’s given. But of course most communication about travel mentions a lot of dates; for example, an airline confirmation might mention the date of a future change in luggage allowance.

Once we’ve got a candidate list of dates, we take a look at your traveller network to see if anyone who shares trips with you is going to the same place. If so, and the dates of their trips are similar to yours (within 24 hours or so) then we bump that date suggestion way up the list. If you and your friends or colleagues are going on the same holiday, conference trip or work visit, this works very effectively.

So the more people you share trips with, the better we get to know you.

For every email or twitter that we scan, we remember how you reacted to the result. If you confirm the trip, that’s a success for our system. If we guessed wrong but you chose one of our alternative suggestions, that’s a partial success. And if not, we failed. In any case, we add your message to the test suite we used to judge the quality of our engine, and use it to improve the results.

So the more messages you send us, the more we can improve our system and make it better for everyone.

Many in the Dopplr community are freelancers or small business owners, with networks that span the globe. If you fit that description, we recommend you take a look at Going Solo, a conference made for you that’s taking place in Lausanne, Switzerland in May.

We’ve created a way for attendees to connect on Dopplr by joining a network of travellers associated with the event. You can read more about it on the Going Solo blog, and don’t forget to add your trip to Dopplr if you’re going.

UPDATE: the organisers have kindly given us a discount code for readers of our blog. Get your ticket now at a 33% discount by using this code: DPLRSG83H

It’s first-come, first-served as the code will only work for the first five registrations to use it.

On a cold winter evening in 2006, the founders-to-be of Dopplr got together in a West London pub to talk about an idea for a new kind of travel website. After much excited discussion about features and ways of working, Matt Jones agreed to participate on one condition: that whatever we made would give travellers a way to understand the carbon impact of their travels.

Today, serendipitously on Earth Day 2008, we’re launching a carbon calculator for your trips. Working with AMEE (”The World’s Energy Meter”) we can automatically build a travel carbon profile for you. Because AMEE are an impartial platform who work with many organisations that collect data or propose solutions, this means that you’ll be able to eventually reuse this profile with other services.

My 2008 carbon calendar looks like this:

Of course, the mode of transport you choose for your trips makes all the difference to their carbon impact. That means an upgrade to our trip form, which now lets you specify how you’re travelling:

Now here’s Matt Jones to give his take on why this matters so much:

One of the aspects of creating social tools that fascinates me is the ability to make the invisible visible, and what effect surfacing these patterns then has on us as individuals and groups.

For a while there have been carbon calculators on airline websites and environmentalist websites, but generally they have been about directly showing the impact of an individual action, rather than the patterns and trends influencing the actions in the first place.

That’s why I thought it was an essential component of from the start of Dopplr as a social tool for intelligent travellers to optimise their path through the world – and I’m delighted the beginnings of this are here now. Particular props to Boris and Tom for pulling off the design, which I’m pleased as punch with.

It’s a first step, and as with everything we do part of the bigger, beautiful jigsaw of the web. As MattB’s said it’s plugged into AMEE, and you might be already be subscribed to things like WorldChanging or EdenBee that can help you decide what to do about it.

It’s not enforcing any particular course of action – it’s the weighing scales, not the diet.

What we all do with this information is up to us.