Dopplr was a free

social networking A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

service, launched in 2007, that allowed users to create itineraries of their travel plans and spot correlations with their contacts' travel plans in order to arrange meetings at any point on their journey. Additional features included allowing the user to calculate the

carbon footprint A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by an individual, event, organization, service, place or product, expressed as carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). Greenhouse gases, including the carbon-containing gases carbo ...

their journeys have produced. The site was named after

Christian Doppler Christian Andreas Doppler ( (); 29 November 1803 – 17 March 1853) was an Austrian mathematician and physicist. He is celebrated for his principle – known as the Doppler effect – that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative ...

, discoverer of the

Doppler effect The Doppler effect or Doppler shift (or simply Doppler, when in context) is the change in frequency of a wave in relation to an observer who is moving relative to the wave source. It is named after the Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, who d ...

. The company was based in the "

Silicon Roundabout East London Tech City (also known as Tech City and Silicon Roundabout) is a Science park, technology cluster of high-tech companies located in East London, United Kingdom. Its main area lies broadly between St Luke's, London, St Luke's and Hackney ...

" area of

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

Notable staff

Marko Ahtisaari Marko Ahtisaari (born 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish technology entrepreneur and musician. Ahtisaari has been CEO and co-founder of two technology companies: Dopplr (acquired by Nokia in 2009) and Sync Project (acquired by Bose in 2018). ...

: CEO and co-founder * Matt Biddulph: CTO and co-founder * Matt Jones: CDO and co-founder *

Dan Gillmor Dan Gillmor is an American technology writer and columnist. He is director of News Co/Lab, an initiative to elevate news literacy and awareness, at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Dan Gillmo ...

: Founding Traveller *

Lisa Sounio Lisa Sounio (born 1970) is a past CEO and chairperson of social networking site Dopplr. She is also the CEO of her own design management consultancy Sonay. She has a background in industrial design management. Early in her career she worked as ...

: Chairman of the Board

Investors

First-round

angel investor An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or owners ...

s in the site included Martin Varsavsky,

Joichi Ito is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Law School. Ito has re ...

Reid Hoffman Reid Garrett Hoffman (born August 5, 1967) is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman was the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for prof ...

, Saul Klein and

. Second-round investors in fall 2008 were:

Tom Glocer Tom Glocer (born October 8, 1959) is an American business executive and the former CEO of Thomson Reuters and Reuters. Biography He is a co-founder and executive chairman of BlueVoyant and Capitolis, cyber defense and fintech start-ups, respec ...

Esther Dyson Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing. Dyson is also an ang ...

Tyler Brûlé Jayson Tyler Brûlé (born November 25, 1968) is a Canadian journalist, entrepreneur, and magazine publisher. He is the editorial director of '' Monocle''. Early years Jayson Tyler Brûlé is the only child of Canadian football player Paul Brul ...

Joshua Schachter Joshua Schachter (; born January 1, 1974) is an American entrepreneur and the creator of Delicious, creator of GeoURL, and co-creator of Memepool. He holds a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg ...

Yat Siu Yat Siu ( Chinese: 蕭逸; born 1973) is a Hong Kong-based entrepreneur and angel investor, who was born and raised in Vienna, Austria. Early years Yat Siu's mother, who was from Taiwan and was born in Lisbon, Portugal, conducted for an orches ...

and

Brian Behlendorf Brian Behlendorf (born March 30, 1973) is an American technologist, executive, computer programmer and leading figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software ...

Reception

A survey carried out in early 2008 on influential technology figures by the

Guardian Media Group Guardian Media Group plc (GMG) is a British-based mass media company owning various media operations including ''The Guardian'' and ''The Observer''. The group is wholly owned by the Scott Trust Limited, which exists to secure the financial and e ...

named Dopplr as a company to watch out for. The ''

Evening Standard The ''Evening Standard'', formerly ''The Standard'' (1827–1904), also known as the ''London Evening Standard'', is a local free daily newspaper in London, England, published Monday to Friday in tabloid format. In October 2009, after be ...

'' named Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones, two of the site's founders, among the thousand most influential people in London in 2007 and again in 2008.

Shutdown

On September 28, 2009, Dopplr announced that they had been acquired by

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporatio ...

. Within a year questions were being raised as to the future of the site, with commentators noting that Dopplr's blog had not been updated since two days after the acquisition and its number of unique monthly users had dropped from 39,000 to 29,000. In a statement issued in September 2010 a Nokia spokesperson reported "we have decided to bring it into a maintenance mode ... but will not develop it further at this stage." In October 2013, the front page was updated with an announcement that the service would close on 1 November 2013, which it subsequently did.

References

{{Nokia British social networking websites Internet services supporting OpenID Geosocial networking Defunct companies based in London Mobile social software Nokia services