Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Dopplr has been acquired by Nokia. Nokia shares our vision of the Social Atlas, the idea that social location data can improve our experience of cities.

To see where people on Dopplr go, you can visit the Shepherdess in London, Hakaniemen Halli in Helsinki, or the Hotel on Rivington in New York. We like these places, and we trust you’ll like them too.

The acquisition does not change the current Dopplr service which is available at Dopplr.com and on platforms where Dopplr is integrated, like Flickr and Twitter. As always, if you so wish, you can get a copy of your data from your account.

XING is one of the biggest professional networks in Europe, with over 7 million members. Now you can link Dopplr to your XING account, and keep your XING contacts informed about the trips you’re making and the places you’ve visited.

It only takes a couple of clicks to set up. Once your XING and Dopplr accounts are linked, a badge will automatically appear on your XING home page showing your planned trips and network activities.

Dopplr knows where your fellow travellers are going, but it can also talk directly to your XING account. That means it spots co-incidences with your XING contacts who are on Dopplr, highlighting when you and they will be in the same place at the same time.

Dopplr badges also appear on your XING canvas and profile views, displaying your current and planned trips, your contacts’ trips, and recommended places that people have discovered en route. You can display a map of your travels; add new trips, and much more.

We’re often asked for more ways to share Dopplr trips and expand travellers’ networks to reach more people, so we hope this new feature will be useful.

If you already have a XING account and would like to connect it to Dopplr, click this link. (If you’re not on XING, you might like to find out more about it.)

As always, we value your feedback .Please get in touch with your questions and comments about this, or any other aspect of using Dopplr.

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Dopplr – The Social Atlas, a free iPhone application available worldwide in the iPhone App Store.

The app puts the combined knowledge of the world’s smart travellers in your pocket. Wherever you are in the world, you can use it to find nearby recommended places to eat, stay and explore. If you make new discoveries of your own, you can add them to the Social Atlas with a few taps of your finger. And every new addition helps to expand the Social Atlas, which is starting small but growing rapidly with the input from Dopplr travellers using their mobile devices.

You don’t even need an account at Dopplr.com to use the app. The built-in directory of city tips and advice works for everyone.

But if you do have a Dopplr account, the application offers a rich social location-based experience. You can keep in touch with your fellow travellers, find out what city and timezone they are in, and what future trips they have planned. You can view your own planned trips, and find co-incidences when fellow travellers will be nearby. You can even contact them directly from inside the app.

Many of you have requested that we make the Social Atlas mobile. This iPhone application is the first step. Dopplr will make the Social Atlas available on all major mobile location-based devices in 2009 including Nokia, Blackberry and Google Android.

We’re honoured that Dopplr has been shortlisted for “Best Web Application or Service” in EMEA at The Europas alongside Spotify, Amiando and other great companies.

The Europas, the TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, are held today July 9 in London. Over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry and these results merged with those from 19 expert advisors.

You can watch the live stream here starting 6pm London time/GMT (10am San Francisco, 1pm New York, 8pm Helsinki).

For more recent media coverage on Dopplr please see our press section.

We’re flattered that excitement about the social atlas we are building, has put Dopplr as the second fastest rising company on the Telegraph High Growth index, behind OpenX and just ahead of the fine folks at Moo.

For more, please see the latest research on how the growing dopplr community worldwide travels and shares travel advice.

Today at the SIME event in Barcelona, we launched the next phase of the Social Atlas and gave a sneak preview of the new Dopplr iPhone app (codename Spitfire) that we’ll launch, Apple willing, next month.

Since we introduced the idea of the Social Atlas earlier this year, the growing Dopplr community has shared tens of thousands of interesting places in cities around the world. What kind of places? Unique hotels. Good restaurants and cafés. Well-known and little-known delights to explore.

Wherever you see a place on Dopplr you can click on the green “+” next to it to say you’ve been there. If it was an especially good place, click a second time to say you’ve been there and liked it. If you want to undo all of this, just click a third time.

But what if you can’t find the place you have in mind? Now you can easily add the unique places you’ve found to Dopplr. Every city, for example Barcelona, has Eat, Stay and Explore sections, and each section has an ‘add a place‘ link which allows you to tell everyone about your own places in that city.

Dopplr will remember all the places you’ve marked, which means it’s easy for you to find them again the next time you repeat that journey. Your tips will also be shared with your network, saving them time and hassle next time they’re in the same area.

Over time, we can anonymise and aggregate all the recommendations that have been added to Dopplr. This is the Social Atlas itself: think of it as “pop charts” for cities around the world reflecting the collective knowledge of smart travellers. It’s still early days, but we are very excited by the potential.

We’d like to share with you the main findings from our recent surveys of Dopplr travellers and analysis of the aggregate travel patterns of the growing Dopplr community around the world. So here, under seven broad headings, is some fresh data:

1. Willing to share travel intention, long before the trip
2. International
3. Independent early adopters of digital technologies
4. Compared to traditional frequent travellers: younger, earn more, travel more
5. Preference for unique hotels
6. For airlines, preference is widely spread
7. Recommendations rule

1. Willing to share travel intention, long before the trip

When people share a trip through Dopplr 2/3 have not yet booked a hotel and 1/2 have not made any travel arrangements at all (e.g. plane or train reservations). Dopplr is of course all about sharing where you will be and the unique places you’ve been. What surprised us is how early in the decision process people share their trips. Dopplr use is clearly part of a larger trend of declarative living – alongside services like Twitter and the status line in Facebook – where Dopplr emphasizes future location and privacy. For an excellent description of this broad phenomenon read Clive Thompson’s “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy.”

2. International

Dopplr may have the most international social graph of any social network. Over half the people on Dopplr share trips with a person from another country. Over 2/3 of the users are from outside of the United States with half of the users coming from Europe, and Asia Pacific growing quickly.

London, New York, San Francisco, Paris and Berlin are the top destination cities. However, as the plot of all Dopplr destinations in 2008 at the very top of this post shows, the tail of destinations is long and covers the entire globe.

3. Independent early adopters of digital technologies

Dopplr users are, no surprise, early adopters of online services with three-quarters claiming regular use of Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter and over half using Flickr or their own blog regularly. They are very independent in terms of making travel arrangements with 3/4 making their travel arrangements themselves either online or by phone.

4. Compared to traditional frequent travellers: younger, earn more, travel more

Dopplr travellers are highly-educated and compared to traditional frequent travellers they are younger, earn more, and travel more. Active travellers on Dopplr made on average 15 trips in the last year. In terms of sectors IT, telecoms, marketing, media and creative industries are over-represented in Dopplr travellers compared to traditional frequent travellers.

Dopplr users are more used to booking directly online with 80% booking directly on an airline website (compared with 30% for traditional frequent travellers).

5. Preference for unique hotels

Dopplr travellers prefer unique travel experiences with over 40% going for boutique hotels when they travel and 25% choosing a trusted chain. As for trusted hotel chains, the top six preferred chains for frequent business travellers on Dopplr were Hilton, W Hotels, Mariott, Starwood, Hyatt and Radisson.

6. For airlines, preference is widely spread

Broadly speaking the digital influencers on Dopplr are highly driven by price and recommendation. They are less loyal than traditional frequent travellers and their preferences for airlines are spread among many more airlines. As an example, for long haul business Dopplr travellers prefer Brittish Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa and United Airlines. In terms of airports AMS, SIN and HKG top the list.

7. Recommendations rule

Travellers on Dopplr are highly interested in and influenced by recommendations from their peers, especially for hotels, restaurants and places to see. The chart below shows claimed influence of recommendations on different travel decisions.

And people are increasingly receiving travel recommendations through digital channels, whether it be all-purpose communication platforms like Facebook, Email or Twitter, or newer more focused platforms like Dopplr. Face-to-face is still by far the most popular medium for travel recommendations, so digital platforms have a lot of potential for growth.

In light of the above observations, you can see why we at Dopplr are excited about building the social atlas, a system for making travel data and advice more open and sharable. Many thanks to all of you who have contributed to our research.

Note: The data above is based on two traveller surveys conducted over the last year (the second with m1ndset), m1ndset independent research into international frequent travellers at airports around the world, and analysis of aggregate travel patterns of the Dopplr community. We will be sharing a full version of our research results shortly. If you’re interested in receiving a copy drop us a line at business(at)dopplr(dot)com.

As part of our New York release this week, we’ve launched an important new set of features on Dopplr that we’re calling the Social Atlas.

The first part of it lets you build a record of places you’ve been in your home city and cities around the world, like quality restaurants and hotels – as well as other things you’ve explored.

The idea is that our collective travel knowledge will inform and improve the travel experience of all. Any places you’ve marked will be visible to the people that can see your travels on Dopplr.

In addition, your choices will be aggregated, anonymised and visualised into part of a unique overall picture of a city visible to all Dopplr users.

We’ve tried to make the process of marking places as easy as possible. Wherever you see a place you can click on the green “+” next to it to say you’ve been there. Click a second time to say you’ve been there and liked it. If you want to undo all of this, just click a third time.

Eventually the Social Atlas will be on mobile devices, part of a Dopplr mobile application which we’ll be launching very soon.

Here are some pages where you can start finding places you may know:

• Beijing: places to eat and places to stay
• Rome: places to eat and places to stay
• London: places to eat and places to stay
• New York: places to eat and places to stay
• Paris: places to eat and places to stay
• Helsinki: places to eat and places to stay
• San Francisco: places to eat and places to stay
• Barcelona: places to eat and places to stay
• Amsterdam: places to eat and places to stay
• Hong Kong: places to eat and places to stay

You can see all of the places you’ve marked.

Where else can you find places you’ve been?

On a city page – say London, New York, or Paris – look for the tabs eat, stay and explore.

You can search for a place such as: ‘Buddha bar Paris’

For the time being you can only mark places listed on Dopplr, but we will soon allow you to add places to the Dopplr directory. Currently our directory covers over 200 main cities, but we want this to grow. We realise this is an important part of keeping the Social Atlas we’re building fresh and relevant.

These features are still very much in development so please let us know of any feedback or ideas for how we can improve them. Thank you for your help.