Dopplr Disappeared Into The Black Hole That Is Nokia: Never To Return?

Perhaps it’s just coincidence that this Jemima Kiss piece about Dopplr was published on the same day that Stephen Elop assumes his new role of Nokia CEO. But the disastrous course of events at Dopplr since they were acquired by the telecom giant does not inspire confidence that the firm is a hotbed of innovation:

Jemima Kiss, The slow death of Dopplr

Founded in Finland early in 2007, Dopplr was the great white, beautiful hope of the UK startup scene; a well-respected design and development team, and a service that imaginatively and stylishly captured the zeitgeist of business, travel and location services.

It published annual travel summaries for users and included their carbon output. It boosted the profile of money-spinning conferences. And – of most interest to potential investors – it attracted a wealthy, technophile and evangelical base of “upscale” business users. Backers included Esther Dyson, Tyler Brule, Joshua Schachter, Lars Hinrichs and Reid Hoffman. So what could go wrong?

In a word: Nokia.

The Finnish mobile manufacturer, which sells more phones than any other company, paid a rumoured $20m (give or take a few million) for the service almost exactly a year ago, with a deal that closed on 28 September, 2009.

Since then, Dopplr has fallen completely out of the web’s view. Its blog has not been updated since two days after the acquisition. While Dopplr was too young to have grown a large user base, the Nokia acquisition could, with some imagination, have given it scale. Instead, comScore shows its monthly unique user numbers falling from 39,000 in September 2009 to 29,000 in July this year.

While the Guardian has been told that Dopplr’s back-end system is still being maintained, its front-of-house appears woefully neglected, with no sign of the much-admired annual travel reports. Even if this was purely a talent acquisition, with the company bought for its staff, why allow the site to wither on the vine?

Dopplr’s design chief Matt Jones had already left, joining Schulze & Webb (reincarnated as Berg) but still tied to Dopplr one day a month as a design advisor. Jones already had close to ties with Nokia as a former director of UX design there. Not only that, chief executive Marko Ahtisaari became senior vice president for design at Nokia, chief tech officer Matt Biddulph and developer Tom Insam both moved to Nokia’s base in Berlin as strategist and developer respectively and are still there, working out lock-in periods.

At the time of the acquisition, people only saw possibility. “I’m guardedly optimistic that Nokia is smart enough to know not screw up a truly elegant service,” wrote Dopplr user Chad in response to the news. Duncan Semple added: “I just hope the service won’t get neglected or changed too much to fit with Nokia’s other services.” Trickles of comments this year have variously asked if anyone is still listening — and, echoing in an empty blog, talked of transferring to rival service TripIt.

Despite numerous requests over a number of weeks for comment about its plans for Dopplr, Nokia has not responded.

I think Dopplr had done a bunch of things right, but had made some serious gaffes as well, both in design and business orientation.

Talking to Marco Artisaari a few years ago, long before the Nokia acquisition, I wondered why the company wasn’t getting into managing travel related information — like hotel reservations and airplane travel, frequent flyer accounts, and the like — which TripIt has done so well, now. But he wanted to remain focused on the social interaction side of things.

But, as I pointed out, Dopplr wouldn’t let me even stipulate the time that I was planning to arrive in, say, Paris on 23 September, or what airline I was on. So that means I couldn’t use the service to alert a friend who was planning to pick me up at the airport.

And worse: what’s the most obvious social activity when visiting a place where you know you have friends? Setting up a get-together. Dopplr provided next to no good ways to do the obvious: inviting friends to get together, pick a place, set a time, etc.

Instead, Dopplr just dropped innovating. Yes, they added partnerships with various travel services — like Mr & Mrs Smith and Tablet Hotels — but they dropped the ball on the social context surrounding the app.

So, Artisaari sold the company to Nokia, where he had worked before, and he took the job of SVP of Design. I am sure he’s doing good things, like the X3 phone:

But Dopplr has fallen into the strange gravity well of Nokia, like Plazes, Cellity, Plum and other acquisitions.

We’ll have to see if Artisaari and Elop can change things within the behemoth to really innovate in software, like these many companies had been doing before their acquisitions.

Tor Nørretranders

A beautifully spare summation of Reboot by Trine-Marie Kristensen:

[from Jaiku]

Post reboot / / / people are streams (Tor) and connections are about flow (Stowe) and products are people too (Webb) .

Tor Nørretranders opening presentation was one of the standouts of Reboot, for me. The line “Sex is the origin of all that is noble” rang like a bell in my head for hours later, and since he kicked off in the main hall on Thursday, it was a perfect bookend for my presentation Friday first thing on the same stage. I am bad at note taking these days, but my friend Lars Plougmann created a mindmap of Tor’s presentation:

.

Stephanie Booth took some notes of my talk (although she disagrees with some of my arguments), here. I will try to create a longish post around my slides tomorrow. (Today it is sunny in Copenhagen, and I intend to go rambling.)

Lars Plougmann also did a mind map of my talk:

Like Trine-Marie, I also thought Matt Webb’s talk was great: we need to think about products — not just AI-inspired software, but all sorts of things in the world — like people if we want to design things better. The way we interact with them should be increasingly like a conversation, not just our fingers jabbing at buttons. His examples were inspired, as usual. And the perfect touch of not being too serious: he consulted the I Ching when he was stumped about how to complete the talk, a few days prior to the conference, so he included the guidance of the Oracle in his talk!

I also enjoyed Leisa Reichelt, Alexander Kjerulf, Stephanie Booth, Håkon Wium Lie, Robert Paterson, Kars Affrink, Marius Watz, and Marko Ahtisaari. The micro presentations were really fun, although the conversion from Powerpoint to Keynote screwed up my fonts. Still, people liked my “Entrepreneurialitis” micropresentation.

The life outside the talks is what makes Reboot so great, and I can’t even begin to try to characterize that, except the Dopplr Users meeting, which was a little more formal.

Pairup and Dopplr: Ships-Passing-In-The-Night

A few months ago I took a look at Pairup, wishing for the perfect ‘ships-passing-in-the-night’ app. (I wonder if Matt Biddulph read that, and started work on Dopplr?)

[from /Message: Pairup]

There is more to Pairup than finding old friends: the service is geared to helping business travelers meet new people as well, such as people attending the same event you are traveling to, or locals with similar interests. I wonder if by trying to do so much, however, the designers have moved too far away from a simple premise, and move into conflict with larger professional social networks? On the other hand, I could make the argument that my “ships in the night” service is really just a feature than a solution like Upcoming.org or Google Calendar could offer.

I am not really in the market to meet new people who happen to be traveling to the same city as me, a capability that Pairup seems geared toward. There is some coolness in trying to learn something about people that are attending a conference with me, but sites like the vastly interesting Reboot.dk website demonstrate what a socially architected conference website can aspire to. So I think that Pairup is smooshing a bunch of features together that are unnatural, which Dopplr — although missing some fine-grained controls that I want, such as the time of day when someone will actually arrive and depart a specific city — focuses on just doing one thing right. This is another case of too many features detracting from a clear focus, I think, so I favor Dopplr over Pairup.

Matt Biddulph Goes Full-time On Dopplr

Matt Biddulph is turning his part-time passion into full-time obsession:

[from hackdiary: Serendipity 2.0: going fulltime on Dopplr]

For the last couple of months I’ve been working on a new project in my spare time. Dopplr is a social network for frequent travellers, designed to increase the amount of serendipity in the world. It lets you share your travel plans with your trusted fellow travellers, and uses them to find the coincidences, near-misses and surprises. Maps, mobile, timelines, feeds, calendars: you can have the information pretty much any way you want it.

Dopplr’s still invite only, but there’s a good chance you know someone with an account by now. We’ll be issuing new invite tokens from time to time, so keep an eye out. There are some screenshots on Flickr and alpha travellers Stowe Boyd and Roo Reynolds have written some illuminating reviews.

[…]

Because I’m having so much fun and I want Dopplr to be as good as it can possibly be, I’ve taken the decision to suspend my freelancing and work on it full time. It seems they’ll let anyone be a CTO these days.

Matt is right: I am an Alpha Traveler. Check out my Dopplr map for the rest of April and the month of May. I haven’t added a trip to Tailinn, Estoni (Dopplr doesn’t recognize that town) or my return to the States after that post-Reboot trip.

It makes me remember something I wrote last year, on /Ambivalence:

[from Out In The Wilds]

Travel is starting to feel more like the natural order. For some time, I have felt that my greatest value for customers arises from face-to-face interaction. so it is logical that I would need to spend time visiting them, since I am the soloist and they are the orchestra.

However, my making peace with travel is more than accepting the inevitable consequences of my calling. There is a true attraction to getting out, living within the constraints of the knapsack, and having time alone out in front of everybody. At home, I have ample time alone: sitting in my tiny 9x6 foot office, hearing the endless whine of the leaf-blowers, and seeing the same trees, changing, always slowly changing, from my single east-facing window. Taking the walk from my house through the park to Lake Anne for Vietnamese soup at Cafe Montmartre, or a Jameson’s at the Tavern on the Lake. There is something strong that comes from doing the same things, again, and again. But I am clearly not intended for the monastic life, since after a week or two, that pull starts tugging.

In a period of a handful of days, this week, I will have as many as a dozen meetings, with savants and seekers, entrepreneurs and engineers, and companies large and small. I will see a never-seen-before product, learn about a company’s recent formation, and hear some juicy bit of gossip that would have passed me by at home. I will walk many miles, ride trains, cabs, and planes, and flit around within an unforgiving schedule like a nightingale in a silver cage. I will stay out late with new friends and old, laughing and learning, and I will work alone in coffeeshops, here, there, and everywhere.

I am a modern nomad, carrying the minimum of possessions in service to the maximum of obsessions. And it’s different sort of strength that comes from this wandering, from staying in different hotels instead of the same old bed, from seeing the sun rise from different windows, through different branches, reaching for the light.

They say that migrating birds can sense the magnetic fields of the Earth, and calibrate their flight with the arcs of the stars, swirling through the skies. What forces am I skating along, as I swing westward, like some 21st century hobo? I feel a humming in the blood, a deep murmuring in my meat: a call, some nearly intangible sensation of being pulled, going, like the birds stroking the air, like the stars sweeping westward.

In the airport, this morning, it felt like the Earth was speeding up, spinning faster beneath my feet, taking me out on the road, as a traveler, a nomad, an unsettled wanderer. Not some civilized villager, living in the sprawl surrounding an eastern metropolis. No. Something else than that, something wilder, something not bounded, something older and deeper, closer to the birds and the stars. A better way to live, a more alive way to be, out in the wilds.

Serendipity 2.0: going fulltime on Dopplr

The folks at Dopplr, who I have not spoken to directly, have apparently built the ‘ships passing in the night’ app that I have cried out for for years (see here, for example).

The premise is simple, plug in your travel schedule, and a bunch of traveling fools as your social network, and bingo: you will know who is going to be in some time (or your home town) when you are.

The interface is clean and simple.

Above you see a list of my trips. Note that I can’t seem to be able to access the RSS feed. Might be a polling interval issue. Dopplr supports iCal subscription from calendar apps.

Above you see my (tiny) set of pals. At the moment, only Petteri, from Jaiku. He invited me to Dopplr. And he’s boring, since he isn’t traveling in the near term, although I just met him, here in San Francisco, the other day.

If you click on a specific place, you see a page like this:

I didn’t add a note, yet.

Above you see a prospective map of my travels. And below, the same itineraries arrayed in a timeline view:

This last view shows one of the snags, I think. The app seems very day focused: I can’t seem to be able to state the time of day that I will arrive somewhere, and that is critical if you are planning to meet for lunch or dinner.

I love the feel of the app, but I will have to wait for a few dozen friends to get into the beta before I can get the feel of it’s actual social usage patterns.

And of course, I need the RSS feed to work. So, I am replacing my old timeline, built using 30boxes, with Dopplr, as soon as the RSS is up.

One last note. Dopplr creates a fuzzy version of your photo to display in a public page. Here’s the stoweboyd page:

It doesn’t look to me like the public page can be disabled at the moment, either.

There is an SMS interface to Dopplr, but you have to text a +44 number, and I decided to wait until they have a US SMS number set up.

More to follow.