dopplr

Ok.. so the companies (finally, perhaps?) today confirmed that Nokia did indeed acquire Dopplr.

Here's the blog entry from Dopplr:

http://blog.dopplr.com/2009/09/28/nokia-acquires-dopplr/

And the press release from Nokia:

http://www.nokia.com/press/press-releases/showpressrelease?newsid=1344044

For a while there many people were a bit sceptic on did the deal happen at all or not; so now you have confirmation.

If you hope to get an inside scoop or some detailed information about this deal from me, the ex-COO of Dopplr, I'm sorry to disappoint you; I have to remain quiet on the topic.

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch Europe published a post a few days back on this. He was keen to analyze Dopplr's "space", history, investors behind the company, and added a bit of speculation on the deal and gave feedback on what has nagged him about Dopplr. Also he probably didn't know that I am also ex-Nokia and excluded me from his list of "Ex-Nokia people who work/worked at Dopplr", no biggie. If there's something I rather like NOT being remembered for; it's being an ex-Nokia person ;)

One thing in Mike's post is a good show of recognition for Dopplr, him saying: " Let’s acknowledge that Dopplr was an amazing idea, designed beautifully and executed almost perfectly." Fully agree there. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to work with the talented team of Dopplr, and the company's "stellar group of backers" (investors). During my time as Chief Operating Officer we were actively building up the launch of Dopplr and the first important critical masses of people. I learned a lot - including to really respect the great skill, talent, motivation and faith of the team members. Their level of commitment, talent and professionalism still remains to be beyond what is found in many many Finnish startups - a lot of you (the startups) would have tons to learn from Dopplr. Get to know the case, the people and learn what you can; I feel entirely that this kind of success can be repeated - so go for it!

Congrats Dopplr Team! - you deserved a good exit! I hope to see Dopplr continue strong with (and despite of) the new corporate owner!

www.dopplr.com published a pretty cool story today in their blog:

http://blog.dopplr.com/2009/01/15/dopplr-presents-the-personal-annual-re...

Dopplr presents the Dopplr Personal Annual report 2008 for Barak Obama's travels.

The quality is top-notch and the execution pretty amazing in detail. The Dopplr team shows their talent yet again. The style of Matt Jones is apparent all over.

You can download the PDF report from this link directly:

http://dplr.it/obama-report

That is such a cool idea! I just had to blog about it. Don't you think so?

I did an interview with Viktoria Trosien for Tiburon TV at the Slush Helsinki event. It just got posted online as a video that you can find from here:

http://www.tiburon-tv.com/2008/12/01/i-started-with-failing-serial-entre...

It's about how I "started with eventually failing" when Taika Technologies had to discontinue after a promising start (that's another war story then). And moves on to stuff that I have been involved in, my views and opinions about how Finland is as a place for startups and what's the local scene like etc.

I make a claim that Finland would be a forward-looking place where people are willing to abandon the old ways if they don't work. Is this really true or not, what do you think?

Dopplr's CEO LIsa Sounio recently made an interview that's now published here:

http://www.pestaola.gr/lisa-sounio-dopplr-ceo-interview/

It's an interesting read, and gets into the "entrepreneurial spirit" pretty fast there. She gives some rather good advice:

(quoted from the article:)
Top 3 tips for entrepreneurs

1. Go ahead even though the idea is not fully clear, you learn
2. Figure up your strengths and complete your weaknesses with excellent partners
3. Small can be beautiful and faster than the elephant

Top 3 mistakes you did but never repeated again

1. Always respect people although they would not respect you
2. I was so afraid at the start, for no reason!
3. Don’t worry for competition. Keep your eyes open and help others as much as possible

That's nicely compressed excellent stuff. Having seen Lisa work from up close I can say that she also does practice what she preaches. Also note how the Finland promo sort of leaks through from the article ;) She's really good at that.

Pic: Me and Lisa "Dopplr Posin" at Dopplr offices. Photo by Matt Biddulph.
It's a picture meme imitating the original photo here.

Listening to Lisa and myself speak about entrepreneurship I'm starting to get the feeling that the proper attitude for success is more and more about something that can be described as "faith". Faith in yourself, in your idea, in your team, etc. Being a successful entrepreneur seems to require courage, faith and some level of stubbornness ;)

Most of you probably know www.dopplr.com the service that brings serendipity to travel by letting you know where your friends will be and when you will meet them next. Dopplr is one of the leading sites in intention broadcasting in this case it's a specific intention tied to travel plans and future locations.

Dopplr also makes for a very nice showcase of excellent design and is well-liked almost universally. Dopplr's team is definitely one of the most competent and outright gifted teams I have ever worked with. The service's lead designer is Matt Jones. Here he is talking about developing Dopplr, object-centered sociality, social infrastructure, personal informatics and other cool stuff:

MX2008 | Matt Jones from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

In June Dopplr released their "Copenhagen" (releases are always named after cities/places) release and with it a feature called public profiles.

Here's a blog entry about that on the Dopplr blog.

The public profile includes some highly cool stuff that might be especially valuable to you if you ever want to broadcast your travel intentions - or possibly your travel past.

For example there's the profile/summary box:

One of the features that people seem to like the most is a world map view of your own personal Raumzeitgeist "Where you have been", that looks rather cool and is well designed:

Your travel past can be made known by a world map + list combination element:

The same applies for your travel future:

Dopplr also includes Tips - on cities, places, things to do, how much to tip the cab driver, random stuff etc. Here are some of mine that I can dynamically pull out of the service:

And finally Dopplr can also tell you how fast you are going. I seem to be having the personal velocity of a duck:

All of this stuff is dynamic and is pulled out of Dopplr live; meaning that if your travel plans change or you add historic past trips in there, the data will change instantly.

This is pretty exciting and cool stuff and I don't know that many other services out there that would be doing similar things, or nearly as good of a job in creating very nice and nifty tools like this for their users. Can you come up with any examples?

Actually this design choice is so good and beneficial that I think a whole lot of other concepts would benefit greatly from incorporating something similar. The simplistic way how it's done is simply beautiful. Why not allow just about any and all social webservices to give out their data like this, if the user personally wants to do such a thing? Sounds like a thing that could only add value and make it more useful, and more well-known, doesn't it?