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.
The Dopplr website will be unavailable for a short time today while our ISP upgrades our network. The maintenance starts at 4pm London time and will last for less than an hour if everything goes smoothly.
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:
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.
We’ve made dedicated shortlinks for key cities around the world so it’s easy to refer to them in tweets, emails and status updates. For major cities just use the city name after http://dplr.it/ and use “-” instead of a space in the name.
Try, for example:
http://dplr.it/london
http://dplr.it/new-york
http://dplr.it/helsinki
http://dplr.it/san-francisco
http://dplr.it/paris
http://dplr.it/sydney
http://dplr.it/madrid
http://dplr.it/amsterdam
Similarly, places to eat and stay in cities have shortlinks. See, for example http://dplr.it/eat/r8i0 and http://dplr.it/stay/kxh0 in London.
It is our goal to make it easier for you to use Dopplr wherever you want. While we mentioned Twitter briefly in our recent Dopplr update, we wanted to say some more about how you can use Twitter and Dopplr together.
You can add trips easily on Dopplr using a Twitter account
There’s a special Dopplr user on Twitter that is there only to receive messages from you, which then get turned into trips on Dopplr. To use this feature you’ll need to first tell Dopplr your Twitter account. Then, you can send it a message by twittering something like “D dopplr a trip to Helsinki on May 19th until May 23rd”, or you can also use the “@dopplr” prefix if you don’t mind the details being seen in ‘public’ on twitter.
What to say
Start your message with “d dopplr” (to send it in private) or “@dopplr” (so it appears in your Twitter timeline). Make sure to mention a placename and two dates, including the month both times. Use one of these three forms of text to be sure we can understand you:
Your Twitter contacts on Dopplr
You can easily check if your Twitter contacts are on Dopplr so that you can share trips with them.
Lastly, remember that the special Dopplr user on Twitter is just a bot. If you want to hear about new developments on Dopplr and the Dopplr team, follow @dopplrhq.
While creating the Personal Annual Report 2008 we uncovered some lovely patterns and information that make building Dopplr worthwhile. For instance we found over 250,000 possible coincidences between fellow travellers last year. That’s a quarter of a million potential dinners we could have made possible!
A lot has happened over the past few months at Dopplr HQ and there’s much more in store. We want you to know what’s happening at our company and where Dopplr is going next. Here are the highlights. You can also follow DopplrHQ on twitter.
More data back to you: The Personal Annual Report
Encouraged by the overwhelming positive feedback on the Personal Annual Report 2008 we sent out, we’re working on more ways to regularly give you back your travel data in useful and beautiful ways. If you have ideas on what data would be most useful to you please let us know.
More ways to use Dopplr via Twitter, email and other social networks
It is our goal to make it easier for you to use Dopplr wherever you want. You can already add trips to Dopplr via Twitter and email without having to visit the site. While there’s lots more to come, we’ve made shortlinks for key cities around the world so it’s easier to refer to cities in tweets, emails and status updates. Try out, for example http://dplr.it/london, http://dplr.it/helsinki, http://dplr.it/san-francisco, http://dplr.it/paris, http://dplr.it/tokyo, http://dplr.it/sydney, http://dplr.it/madrid and http://dplr.it/amsterdam
More ways to mark the past - the social atlas
One of the most frequent requests we’ve had from Dopplr travellers is for more ways to browse and annotate past trips, in particular ways to record good places to eat, stay and explore in cities around the world. Dopplr will introduce a very easy way to say that you’ve visited a restaurant, hotel or, for instance, a great local market. As you visit cities around the world, Dopplr will alert you to the places your network has been and enjoyed. We will ask for your help in building out this social atlas in the coming months. To get a sense of how this will work check out St. John in London at http://dplr.it/eat/qg01.
Looking for a person or a city on Dopplr? Search
We have just launched an improved Dopplr search. Search is a great way of finding people, cities and - as we build out the social atlas - places to eat, stay and explore. You’ll find the search bar in the top section of each page on Dopplr. Give it a try!
Strengthening the team
Finally, we’re excited that Marko Ahtisaari has joined the team as our new CEO at the beginning of the year. We’ll be using our second financing round to further improve the user experience, strengthen the team and build out the business model. In the current global economic environment we believe Dopplr is more relevant than ever as a service that helps you optimize the future and travel smarter.
Conference season in the internet industry has arrived. Heading for New York next week for the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2009? Join the group for the conference and don’t forget to add your trip on Dopplr!
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!