This morning, Nokia officially announced its acquisition of Dopplr, a popular trip planning startup based in Helsinki, Finland. Dopplr’s service allowed you to plan trips and get reports on which of your contacts might be in a nearby city at the same time you were, among other features. Most have been wondering why Nokia would purchase Dopplr, especially following the acquisition of Plazes not too long ago and Plum last week.
Reading the latest post on the Dopplr blog, I think we can get a quick idea:
Early on after we launched the Dopplr private beta to a small crowd of international friends and industry colleagues, I posted a screenshot of some graphs on Flickr. The graphs showed sparklines of real travel patterns to major world cities, and in the description I wrote “I’m so excited about what we’ll be able to do with the dopplr dataset in the future.” Now Dopplr is a well-established site, we’re thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to wield data as a tool to make better services.
There are plenty of great sites out there where you can find subjective reviews and star-ratings of places round the world. We wanted to do something different, building lists of the best places ranked by everything that we know about the traveller. Because of our existing community, we already know all sorts of things about our travellers’ habits – for example, we know who visits New York most often, and we know who lives in Europe. These “opinionated lists” would tell us things like where Europeans eat in Tokyo, or where frequent visitors to New York stay compared to people visiting for the first time. [source]
Dopplr currently has an iPhone app (wonder what’ll happen to that, lol) that allows users to quickly search for various places nearby, such as hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, and more.
Clearly, with Nokia’s focus on navigation and ‘SoLo’ (Social Location), Dopplr is a great fit. Nokia will be able to maintain massive databases that track who goes where (as long as they’re checking in, of course) and when. Taking this a step further, let’s look at how this could integrate with Ovi Maps.
Today, as you’re navigating around, Ovi Maps is rather useless, until you’ve told it where you want to go, like other navigation applications. It knows where you are, and you tell it you want to go to Point B, and there you go. Ovi Maps, then, is currently rather ignorant. Fast forward a bit, and with Dopplr’s database and algorithms and whatnot, Ovi Maps might start recommending things to you. If you have been driving since noon, and it’s getting close to 6-7p, Ovi Maps might start looking ahead to see what’s coming up. It might see that there’s a fantastic BBQ restaurant ahead, and that you’ve stopped at BBQ restaurants before. You may, then, see a pop-up on your Ovi Maps, something like, ‘You haven’t eaten in 6 hours, and there’s a BBQ place that you might like just ahead. Would you like to navigate there?’
Personally, I would *love* to see a more personalized GPS system that I could leave running all the time, like Waze. I’d like for it to know that I don’t normally drive more than 2 miles off the freeway to get gas/food when I’m on a road trip, and that I don’t like to drive on one-way streets. What do you think? Would that be creepy, or would that be just the thing that GPS systems need to really become useful?
Of course, the problem with all this is that it assumes Nokia is going to be able to execute properly. Based on the last 24 months of Ovi development, the above is likely more of a pipe dream than something you or I will see in our lifetimes.
