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…

The technology world is once again gathering in Paris this week for LeWeb’08 as is clear from the map above. The circles represent the places from which world travellers on Dopplr are coming to Paris. If you’d like to stay in touch with other participants after the event join the Dopplr LeWeb’08 group.

Congratulations to Geraldine and Loic Le Meur for putting together an impressive event that includes a Finnish Sauna! (via Thomas Crampton)

Today we’re announcing a new addition to the Dopplr team. Marko Ahtisaari will be joining us as CEO, while Lisa Sounio will continue on the board as Chairman. We’re very excited about this news. For the details, here’s our press release in full:

Dopplr appoints Marko Ahtisaari as CEO

London and Helsinki, 8 December 2008 – Dopplr, the online service for smarter travel, today announced it has appointed Marko Ahtisaari as CEO, effective January 1st 2009. Co-founder and founding CEO Lisa Sounio will become Chairman, alongside fellow board members Tyler Brûlé and Saul Klein.

Saul Klein, investor and board member said: “Since launching to a select group of global companies last fall, Dopplr has attracted an international following of smart travellers. I want to thank Lisa for her fine work in launching Dopplr. As a founding investor Marko knows the team well and with his background in mobile services and media is an excellent fit to grow the business.”

Marko Ahtisaari has worked previously as Director of Design Strategy at Nokia and serves on the board of directors of F-Secure and Artek. Most recently Ahtisaari has been Head of Brand & Design at Blyk, the free mobile network for young people funded by advertising, and will continue in a role supporting Blyk in its partnering and expansion strategy.

Marko Ahtisaari said: “Nearly two years ago, one evening in London, the Dopplr idea of smarter travel was born. Today, Dopplr is an important intention sharing service online, akin to social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but with a tight focus. When people share their travel plans and tips through Dopplr their mind is already set on the travel experience: on where their colleagues and friends are going, how they’re getting there and what hotels they’re staying at. They are interested in buying travel services based on the recommendation of their network. I’m delighted to be joining the team as we move forward with our vision of smarter travel for the growing Dopplr community worldwide.”

In September 2008 Dopplr announced its second financing round from a group of prominent international investors — all users of the service. The investors include Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé, Thomas Glocer, Yat Siu, Aditya dev Sood, Lars Hinrichs, Joshua Schachter, Brian Behlendorf, Daniel Sachs, Joshua Cooper Ramo, 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.

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. Dopplr has offices on London’s Silicon Roundabout and the Helsinki seaside. www.dopplr.com

ENDS

Media enquiries:
press@dopplr.com
www.dopplr.com/main/press
Photo of Marko Ahtisaari by Joi Ito from the Wikimedia Commons

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!

This week we’ve launched a revamp of the first pages you see after you log in. These new “traveller overview pages” look like this:

They’re designed to bring more of the important information about upcoming coincidences and trips together in one place. Look in the Your Trips tab for an easy way to browse your old trips, something many of you have asked for.

Look out for another blog post soon, in which Celia Romaniuk will go into detail on the design thinking that went into this revision. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think.

Last month we hosted an enjoyable evening for Dopplr travellers at the offices of Monocle magazine in London. Thanks again to everyone who came along; travellers from all over the world were present. We all know the value of events in keeping in touch with our international network, and we’ve been working hard to support that on Dopplr. Using our new “groups” features, we’ve started to create groups for events across several industries. A few upcoming examples: DG New Context Tokyo; ad:tech New York; Monaco Media Forum; SIME; Nokia World; LeWeb ‘08 Paris.

At Dopplr we believe deeply in the beauty of information. Not only are event groups useful to keep track of people you meet and want to stay in touch with, we’re producing some attractive visualisations of travel patterns around the events. See our previous blog post for a great example from the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo Europe.

The more people you share trips with on Dopplr, the more useful it gets. Reading your feedback (see the sidebar for ways to get in touch with us), we’re often asked for more ways to expand your social network and make sure that your trusted friends and colleagues are with you on Dopplr. For a long time we’ve offered the ability to find and invite travellers via networks like LinkedIn, Yahoo Mail or Facebook. However, using one of those import features is a one-off process and requires you to go back and check again frequently.

No longer! We’ve just introduced something very simple that we call Social Network Subscription. Simply select the networks you’d like to check for people you already know, and Dopplr will scan them once a week and offer you a list in your regular alert email.

The science bit

Back in March, Drew McLellan wrote an article titled Don’t Import, Subscribe in which he asked why sites like Dopplr and Flickr allowed you to find your friends on other sites, but didn’t automate the process for you. An import is useful, but why couldn’t one site subscribe to the social network of another?

The problem with checking your social data on another website used to be that it required you to give us your password (this is known as the Password Anti-Pattern). Luckily, these days most sites support some form of OAuth, which lets us access your data elsewhere without you ever giving away your password.

With this in place, it’s not a big step to go from a one-off import to a regular subscription. Here’s a screenshot of the first prototype I made, which ended up being almost identical to the final result:

As always, get in touch if you want to talk more about how it works, or have any problems or suggestions.

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.

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.