We spotted a nice item in BusinessWeek about Dopplr, but unfortunately couldn’t find it online (yet). Click on the image to see it large enough to read the text…

Everyone hates to enter data twice. A few weeks ago we added a feature that lets you update Dopplr from a Google calendar. Now we’re happy to help you update Dopplr via your Apple Macintosh desktop iCal calendar. Here’s how:

In your iCal calendar, create a new calendar and name it something such as “Travel” or “Dopplr travel” or whatever you like:

Now create a new event in that calendar:

Double click (or click Command-I) the event that now shows up in your calendar and fill in the appropriate information:

This part is important to get right. It helps a great deal if you enter the location information precisely, or Dopplr may guess wrong and create the wrong location on the Dopplr site (which would be bad for serendipity with your trusted friends and colleagues). Remember that Dopplr works with the place names of cities and towns, so make sure you don’t put in a full street address or other details.

In the example above, we’ve created a marketing meeting on June 2-4, 2008, in the windy city of Chicago, which is in Illinois in the U.S. Notice that we wrote “Chicago, IL, United States” — not because Dopplr would be likely to get that particular city wrong but rather to illustrate how we recommend you enter the place name. (If you enter a simple city name and we get it wrong in Dopplr, don’t worry — you can fix it, and we’ll tell you how below.)

Also in this example, we’ve put in a note, “Make sure ad rep is there” as a reminder to ourselves. It and the title of the event “Marketing meeting” will be published on Dopplr, but only in your private trip notes there. In other words, nothing you create in your personal calendar — apart from the dates and places — will be viewable by your Dopplr fellow travellers.

OK, click “Done” and the trip will show up in your calendar. Then go to the menu and select Calendar-Publish:

You’ll see the box below. Select “Publish on: a Private Server” from the pull-down item.

Of the options in Publish calendar, Dopplr cares only about one: “Publish titles and notes.” While you may have selected the others, and may well use them in your desktop calendar, they won’t have any effect in Dopplr. You may also want to check “Publish changes automatically” so you won’t forget to update; the only disadvantage is that Dopplr may first record a trip to “New Event” before you finish entering the details, but that’s ok, because when you do finish it’ll update.

When you select “a Private Server” you’ll see this input box:

OK, now go to your Dopplr page and be sure you’re logged into your account. Click on “Your account” at the top and then on “Import trips from external calendars” on the page where we have various account settings. (direct link)

Near the end of that page you’ll see a paragraph that says:

Alternatively, you can publish a calendar from iCal to the following private server URL (no username or password required):
https://www.dopplr.com/upload/[and a long set of letters and numbers]…./

Copy that link into the Private Server address in the iCal form (we smudged the url but you get the idea):

Apple insists on a username and password. Make something up; you don’t need to put in your Dopplr username/password, as we don’t require it for this step. But you do need to type in something.

Click “Publish” and you’re done. You’ll see a note before you get back to iCal telling you how to let people know if you want them to be able to subscribe to this calendar outside of Dopplr (though we confess we’re not sure why you’d want to do that).

Now you’re set. In iCal, make sure to “Refresh” the exported calendar — right-click on the travel calendar you’re exporting and choose “Refresh” to update our server. (Remember, you can also tell iCal to “Publish changes automatically”.)

Now go back to your Dopplr page. Voila, the trip(s) should be there, as below:

When you click “More details on this trip” you find, in the private note — not the one seen by fellow travellers — the notes you put into iCal when you created the trip. You can still add a note for them to see in the “Add note” box at the bottom of the trip page.

Important: We strongly recommend that you edit trip dates and places only in iCal (or other external calendar). If you edit in Dopplr you’ll break the link back to the external calendar, and there’s nothing we can do to fix that.

If Dopplr does bring in the wrong place name, we recommend that you fix it this way:

Click the “Edit this trip” link (on the right in the above image). Let’s imagine we really intended to go to a different Chicago (and had put it in the original iCal trip as just “Chicago,” which Dopplr would interpret to be the big Illinois city as the most likely candidate. Type “Chicago” (without the quotes) in the Destination: field and wait a couple of seconds. You’ll see some activity followed by this screen:

This invites you to see other places called Chicago, and gives you a link to click to see them. Click it and you’ll see this:

Copy the name of the city you actually intended — in this case we’ll choose Chicago Heights, IL, United States — into your clipboard. Copy just the text, not the hyperlink. Now — very very important — cancel your edit. Do not click the “Done” button.

Next, go back to iCal and paste in the correct city name. Like this:

Click “Done” and the iCal trip event will be updated. So will Dopplr:

We wish we could make this part easier. But iCal and other external calendars tend to publish in one direction only.

Let us know how it works for you. We’ll be adding tweaks and fixes.

AP: EU Allows Mobile Phones on Airplanes. Under the plan approved Monday, cell phone users could make and receive calls through an onboard base station. They will be allowed to turn their phones on after the plane reaches 10,000 feet, when other electronic devices such as portable music players and laptops are permitted. But a host of issues remain, from the cost of mid-flight phone service, to backlash from those who dread the thought of being trapped for hours listening to one-sided conversations.

Uh, oh…

I have no issue with someone making a mobile call in a quiet and unobtrusive way, preferably turning away from me and others so that we’re not bombarded with information we really don’t want to hear. Even a quick call to let someone know that the plane has landed is fine with me. It’s the loud, long, and ultimately selfish mobile callers who raise my ire.

To make the point that the chatter is intrusive, I sometimes visibly listen to the person who’s talking, and even take notes if obviously listening doesn’t work. Amazing how quickly these folks wrap up their calls.

This also works when people around me are having a loud conversation and ignore requests to lower the volume. (Most people in my experience simply don’t realize they’re bothering others, and are glad to tone it down when asked politely.)

Of course, my ultimate defense is listening to music with my noise-canceling headset. That should not be necessary in a halfway civilized world.

Heathrow’s one-bag carry-on restriction has been lifted, thank heavens. Now you can carry on your roller bag plus your computer case or other small bag separately.

Also, you no longer have to remove the computer from the bag. Seems that Heathrow has new gear that inspects it inside the case.

Anyway, small progress at an airport that has had its share of traveller woes…

A Sunday Times (London) magazine article today, entitled “The new dotcom boom“, discusses Dopplr among other companies, and has a great picture of Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones. The photo is only in the print edition, not the online one.

As MattB tells the newspaper, “We’re trying to recreate the joy of travel, rather than the queues and grief.”

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.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just added a feature that is among the most requested by all of you: subscribing to your online calendar and adding trips from it into Dopplr automatically.

Today we’ll explain how to use Google Calendar with Dopplr - although this feature works with any calendar that can publish an iCalendar feed to the web. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to do it.

First, create a new calendar. We suggest calling “My Travel” or some such thing, but of course that is up to you. When you create it, do not make it a public calendar unless you want the whole world to be able to find it via Google search.

Now, in your new Google Calendar, create an event as we show below. Set the dates in the “When” fields. Be sure to put the location in the “Where” field (that’s the most reliable way to tell Dopplr what your destination is, although we’ll also scan the title and description for place names if we don’t see a location).

IMPORTANT: To help ensure that Dopplr understands your actual destination in the Where field, please make sure the city name goes first, not after a street address. For example, “San Francisco, 21 Streetname” will work, whereas “21 Streetname, San Francisco” will unfortunately confuse Dopplr. Also, if you’re using a common city name — such as Cambridge — you’ll get better results by giving more information, e.g. “Cambridge, MA” (Massachusetts in the United States) or “Cambridge, United Kingdom”. Dopplr is smart but can’t read your mind; we’re working on ways to make this process easier for you.

Once you’ve finished entering your information about the trip, click the Save button.

Below, you’ll see the event in your calendar.

Now, under “My Calendars” (below left), click the down-arrow link next to “My travel” (or whatever you called your travel calendar). You’ll see this:

Click “Calendar Settings” and look at the “Calendar Details” tab in this screen:

At the bottom of that screen…

… click the ICAL button next to Private Address: — this is very important if you want to keep your travel plans private to yourself and your trusted Dopplr travellers — and you’ll get a pop-up that looks something like this:

Copy that URL into your clipboard. Now go to your Dopplr page and click on “Your account” (at the top of your page). Then click “Import trips from external calendars” and you’ll see this:

Paste in the URL you copied from your new Google calendar. Dopplr will look at that calendar, and let you know if it’s found some trips. In this case it found the Amsterdam trip created in our example. Click “Subscribe to calendar”.

And automagically it’ll appear on your Dopplr calendar. That’s it. Now when you update your Google calendar, Dopplr will discover the changes and reflect them on your Dopplr page. There will be a note of it in your journal and in your email alerts.

Note: If you change something in Dopplr you’ll break the link between the external calendar event — but not the entire calendar, whew — and Dopplr. (Trips you create in Dopplr won’t affect the Google calendar, however, or break the connection.) If that’s a concern, you may want to do all of your updating of trips from the Google Calendar.

Coming soon: Apple iCal to Dopplr.

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.

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.

We’ve just turned on a cool feature that many of you have requested: an easy way to act on trip coincidences — email from individual trip pages.

Go to any of your trip pages (it’s the “More details on this trip” link in the list of your upcoming places). Then look under Coincidences, on the right side of the page.

Assuming one or more of your fellow travellers either lives there or is going to be there at the same time, you’ll see another link that says “Sent them an email?” Click that, and we take you to a form that lets you check boxes next to the people to whom you want to send messages, with a box containing the text that you’ll then compose.

There’s a detailed explanation on that page as well, regarding message privacy and other things.

We’ll be upgrading this feature soon, with (for example) a way to change the subject line to something you choose instead of the generic ” A message about my trip to [city name]” –

Let us know how it works for you.