Fortune magazine has an extremely kind item about Dopplr in an article entitled “Web 2.0 gets down to business” — a look at how applications such as this one are becoming a vital part of modern business. The magazine quotes several Dopplr users including JP Rangaswami, a managing director at British Telecom:

(He) has become a heavy user of this tool for sharing travel itineraries. (He also has 500 friends in Facebook and follows 300 on Twitter.) Before Dopplr, which launched last December, it took repeated e-mails to keep contacts informed of his whereabouts. Now his 140 Dopplr contacts know where he is at any moment.

“You can really optimize your time when traveling,” says Rangaswami. One Dopplr friend recently saw he was going to Dublin and out of the blue recommended a good Indian restaurant.

We’re also happy to have been listed among PC World magazine’s “101 Fantastic Freebies” in the new issue.

In a column entitled “The Coming Ad Revolution” in today’s Wall Street Journal, famed thinker and investor Esther Dyson puts Dopplr into an emergent social-media context:

Look at Dopplr (where I plan to become an investor), a site for travelers. I list my trips, and see how they intersect with my friends’ itineraries. “Oh, we’ll both be in London April 4? Let’s get together!” Or, “Juan and Alice will be in town next Tuesday. Let’s hold a dinner!” You can imagine or visit equivalent approaches for books (a hypothetical Amazon 2.0, new and more personalized), clothes (Glam.com and Stardoll.com), and even money management.

Very excited to announce that Celia Romaniuk is going to be joining us part-time to turn up the heat on the stew of feedback, comments, blogs and conversation that we have around Dopplr and help turn it into sweet, nutritious new functionality and design.

We wanted to make a lot better use of the passionate and vocal users we’ve got, and Celia’s role is going to be both working with Dan Gillmor to reach out to them (you?) and understand what’s working and not-working-so-well for them; and working with us in the development team to turn that into working reality as fast as possible.

Celia’s worked as an interaction designer for about 10 years, for companies like Razorfish,
the BBC and Skype.

Last year, she relocated from London to Sydney with her partner and little boy; so our timezone coverage of the globe is almost complete!

She says:

“…the places I’d most like to travel to right now are London, New
York and Helsinki. That the places I will actually travel to this year
are the Lamington National Park in Queensland, Nannup in Western
Australia and the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney. (i.e. I’m thinking
urban, but I’m getting nature – not that that’s a bad deal at all, now
that I think about it :)”

Welcome/Terve Celia!

UPDATE: You can now buy a poster of the Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007 from ImageKind.

While we’re busy working on new stuff for 2008, we thought it would be fun to look back at the first year of Dopplr in our inaugural “Raumzeitgeist” round-up.

Zeitgeist of course means “Spirit of the times”. You’re probably familiar with Google’s wonderful ‘zeitgeist’ report they publish annually, reflecting culture in what people were searching for that year.

“Raumzeitgeist” translates literally as “Space Time Spirit” and that’s precisely what we’ve got here. It’s about where we, the users of Dopplr, travelled through space and time on our little planet last year…

In 2007:

Dopplr travellers lived in 172 different countries (4310 cities), and visited 201 different countries (6088 cities).

52% of trips were within the same country. As you might expect, the top ten trips within the same country were all in the USA.

The average Dopplr trip was 5682 miles (each way – so if they were all round-trips the average total travel per trip was double that).

As you can see from the graph below – this average trip length results from the ‘double-hump’ displayed, where there are peaks in the 1000-2000 mile trip range and the longer-haul, 9000-10000 mile range.

The top ten trips were:

• London to Paris
• San Francisco to New York
• Helsinki to London
• London to New York
• San Francisco to Los Angeles
• New York to San Francisco
• Boston to New York
• Los Angeles to San Francisco
• London to Amsterdam
• London to San Francisco

The top ten destination countries were:

• USA
• Great Britain
• Germany
• France
• Spain
• Italy
• Canada
• Netherlands
• Sweden
• Finland

And the image at the very top of this post?

That’s a picture of Earth in 2007 as plotted by Dopplr’s travellers.

When we generated the mapping of it (and many thanks to Aaron for his help in doing so) we were stunned by the coverage – there is perhaps some all-too-predictable density and sparseness but the resemblance to NASA’s image of the earth at night inspired me to create the above graphic, summing up 2007’s Dopplr Raumzeitgeist.

Where next in 2008?

——
P.s…
There’ll be more on the data, how we generated it and your chance to get your hands on it in order to make your own visualisations – in my next blog post.

According to the Guardian, a executive poll ranked Dopplr among “media sensations to watch” this year:

Search giant Google, its mobile developer platform Android – and James Murdoch – are the media sensations to watch in 2008, according to a survey of media executives and consultants carried out by the Guardian Media Group. GMG, which owns the MediaGuardian.co.uk website, asked 120 influential digital practitioners to predict the brands, sites and people to watch this year. Respondents picked out the social travel network Dopplr.com, the popular teen site Bebo, tech giants Apple and Microsoft as well as TokBox, the online video phone service.

We are naturally delighted, because we aim to be an essential service for frequent business travelers. Thanks to them for their support.

The BBC, covering LeWeb, had extremely kind words for us. In a story entitled “Europe can ‘lead web technology’,” the Beeb wrote, in part:

Europe has its success stories as well as the Valley. Last.FM was sold to US media company CBS Corp. for $250m this year and many think Dopplr, a social network for business travellers, will be the next big company from the continent.

Dopplr announced at LeWeb that it will let anyone who wants to use their service to register for free, shifting from an invitation only basis.

By telling Dopplr who your friends are, and where you are travelling, it will tell you when you and your friends are in the same city.

To globetrotters who attend conferences such as LeWeb, the service has proved popular, and by opening it up to allow anyone to register, Dopplr is entering its heavy growth phase.

UPDATE: A new and shorter tour is now available.

A major design goal of Dopplr has been simplicity: We believe you should be able to use the site with almost no special help other than what’s in front of you on each page.

That said, we’d like to introduce a “Dopplr Tour” page that we hope will highlight some key features for longstanding Dopplr travellers as well as new ones. If you are new to Dopplr you can sign-up here.

Please take a look. Let us know how we can make it better. Like the service itself, we’ll be improving the tour as time goes on.

Meanwhile, here we go:
Continue reading…

In our bursting-at-the-seams London office, some Dopplr people. From the top left, clockwise, are Tom Insam, Matt Biddulph, Matt Jones and Boris Anthony.

We are thrilled to see that in this New York Times Q&A, WIkipedia founder Jimmy Wales cites his “Favorite non-Wiki Web-site”:

An invitation-only travel site called Dopplr.com. You put in your travel schedule and link to your friends. It allows you to see where everyone is. I love it.

We’re pretty fond of Wikipedia, too…

As well as writing a great Dopplr How-To, as Dan has already mentioned, the Maholo crew created an infomercial for us!

I think now that we have become worthy of parody, we can say we’ve arrived. I’m definitely going to be taking style tips for my Movember facial hairstyle from our new fictional founder – Don Dopplr Jnr…