Aside from Dopplr’s quiet disappearance after its acquisition by Nokia and Tripit’s exit to Concer, web-based travel planning is still, arguably, one of the holy grails of the web. flextrip, a new startup operating out of Europe and the US and founded by long time entrepreneurs Leith Stevens, Alex Kremer and Andrew Glover, aims to facilitate travel planning by offering real-time offers for tours and activities – a branch of the travel industry that is still somewhat neglected despite its estimated global market size of $89 billion.
Flextrip is a stand alone service that lets you plan your travels by pulling in your Dopplr or Tripit travel details, analyzing that data and serving real-time offers from local operators. Tour operators working with flextrip on the other hand receive SMS notifications whenever a potential travel customer plans a tour in some city or region. They in turn can then make targeted offers to the traveller . → Read More
The damn ink isn’t even dry on the Dopplr acquisition by Nokia that everyone said would never happen (it did). And yet, we’re now hearing rumors that Nokia is quietly looking for a buyer to take the travel social network off their hands.
Whoa. What? The deal was announced on September 24. It’s been less than a month. Not even eBay throws away acquisitions that quickly.
According to our source, all Nokia really wanted from the acquisition was the team, particularly CEO Marko Ahtisaari (formerly a star Nokia guy) and CTO Matt Biddulph. Suddenly, Mike Butcher’s article about the deal on TechCrunch Europe makes a lot of sense. → Read More
So finally the official word is in, with a very short blog post by CEO Marko Ahtisaari: Dopplr has been acquired by Nokia.
Update: Nokia’s press release
Update 2: Dopplr angel investor Martin Varsavsky on the deal: ‘Nokia as a force of good in the European start up scene’
No word on price, but when Michael Arrington broke the news last week on TechCrunch, he wrote that Nokia had picked up the fledgling company for between €10 million and €15 million ($15 million – $22 million based on current exchange rates). → Read More
So finally the official word is in, with a very short blog post by CEO Marko Ahtisaari: Dopplr has been acquired by Nokia.
Update: Nokia’s press release
Update 2: Dopplr angel investor Martin Varsavsky on the deal: ‘Nokia as a force of good in the European start up scene’
No word on price, but when Michael Arrington broke the news last week on TechCrunch, he wrote that Nokia had picked up the fledgling company for between €10 million and €15 million ($15 million – $22 million based on current exchange rates). → Read More
Nokia has been on an acquisition tear lately, albeit mostly small deals (Plum, Cellity and Bit-Side all this year). A source close to the deal says that they’ve just made one more acquisition: boutique travel social network Dopplr, headquartered in London.
The purchase price, we’ve heard, is between €10 million and €15 million ($15 million – $22 million based on current exchange rates). Dopplr cofounder and CEO Marko Ahtisaari was previously the Director of Design Strategy at Nokia.
We first covered Dopplr in 2007 when it closed on seed funding. The site has never grown to huge usage, but core users are passionate about the service, which lets them share travel plans with friends. And they’ve supposedly raised just €1.25 million or so in total funding.
Update: TechCrunch Europe has more analysis. → Read More
Dopplr has launched an iPhone app they are billing as a “social atlas”. Curiously, and possibly wisely, you don’t even need an account at Dopplr to use the app, meaning it will get exposed to a lot more potential users. However, a let down from the get-go is that you can’t add upcoming trips from within the app right now, which is kinda the point with Dopplr, as it’s users will attest – although the feature is planned, they say. Till then if you want to add trips on mobile people can use the site, twitter, SMS or email in the usual manner, of course.
The app appears first on the iPhone, but apps for Nokia, Blackberry and Google Android platforms are also in the pipeline. The app is available from the iTunes store here. There is plenty of content inside the app pulled from Dopplr’s own content as well as your social network. The question mark with Dopplr is how it will continue to fair against Tripit, which is tearing along at a fast pace and recently launched premium flight monitoring and alerts. → Read More
Are you looking for the best beer bars in the world, good places to make out in San Francisco, or where to go on the Big Island in Hawaii? A travel recommendation site called nextstop mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputation system and elements of gameplay to come up with a new social online travel guide.
The site has been in beta for a few months, although it hasn’t gotten much attention yet. It was started by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who helped launch Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picassa (Graham). A third co-founder, Charles Lin, was a Stanford classmate of Graham’s. The site grew out of their frustration with finding interesting things to do in unfamiliar places. “It is difficult to discover something new when you don’t know what to look for,” says Sjogreen. → Read More
Cubic Telecom, the TechCrunch40 company behind the traveler-friendly SIM card MAXroam, has partnered with Dopplr to sell the card through its online store. The Dopplr-branded SIM card will be available for a reduced rate of €45 (down five euro from its normal price).
Both companies have a strong travel focus: Cubic Telecom’s MAXroam allows users to use their unlocked cell phones in over 180 countries, saving around 60-80% on roaming charges. Dopplr offers a social network for travelers looking to meet up with their friends. The site will use your travel schedule to determine when you’ll be in the same area as a friend, and then help you set up a get-together. → Read More
Airline group Air France-KLM, formed after the merger of Société Air France and the Royal Dutch Airlines and currently the largest airline company in the world in terms of operating revenues, has recently launched a social network for travelers called Bluenity to connect its +75 million customers when traveling (presumably so that they can meet up with strangers).
An airline moving into social networking is interesting, so we decided to take a look and see how it compares to internet startups who are looking to monetize social platforms catered to travelers. Unfortunately, in this case, it turns out to be not much more than a marketing exercise. → Read More
Dopplr, the UK-based social network for global travelers, is testing a new feature on some of its members which might make the Yelps and Trusted Places of this world sit up and take notice. The new Dopplr feature lets you share tips and recommendations on cities – usually a core feature of location-based social networks. Core Dopplr members are being given access to the feature this week prior to a wider roll-out. So for instance, as well being able to see who in your network is travelling to Paris this month, you can also see any tips they have on the city. For instance, under Paris, Co-Founder Matt Biddulph has put “Le Potager du Marais vegetarian restaurant… Traditional French dishes done vegetarian.” However, Biddulph denied the intention with this new feature was to create a “listings” style section: What we hope people will write in their tips is things like “Walk along the cliffs at Bronte Beach” for Sydney, rather than just reviewing restaurants. It’s all about sharing travel experiences, not creating a directory. A big part of this test phase is to see how testers react to the plain entry form as it is right now. Then we’ll decide how much we need to add in the way of advice and examples. So, perhaps not something to quite get the ‘networking around location’ startups too worried just yet, but certainly something they will be keeping their eye on. → Read More
Dopplr, an invite-only social network for sharing travel plans with friends, has announced early-stage financing of an undisclosed amount from Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein. The social network bills itself as useful for people who travel at more than five times per year and want to inform friends of where they plan to go. The greatest benefit from sharing travel plans seems to come from discovering when friends will be in the areas of the world you plan to visit. If you decide to take a trip to London, for example, and one of your friends currently lives there, Dopplr will notify you of that fact. While not yet open to the public, the company claims that Dopplr’s users have already shared 110 million kilometers (70 million miles) of trips to over 2000 cities around the world. The investors in this round of funding have financed other notable companies such as Last.fm, Joost, FON, LinkedIn, Flickr, Technorati, Wikia, Xing, Stardoll, Six Apart and Netvibes. Want or have an invitation to Dopplr? Head over to InviteShare. Thanks for the screenshot David. → Read More
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