Today, Dopplr, the social network for business travelers, announced that it has secured a second round of financing. The lead investor for this round is Ester Dyson. Other investors include Tom Glocer from Reuters, Joshua Schachter from delicious, and magazine publisher Tyler Brule. Dopplr received its first seed investment from Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman, and Joichi Ito in September 2007. Dopplr expects to use this new round of financing to expand its business globally. Currently, Dopplr's user base is mostly in Europe and the U.S.
Since then, Dopplr has seen some nice growth, but according to Compete and Google, this growth stalled during the summer.
Dopplr mostly courts frequent fliers and business travelers. Currently, it mostly functions as a way for this group to keep track of travel plans and arrange impromptu meetings. Overall, Dopplr's functionality is quite spartan, but thanks to its budding recommendation and review system, the site is slowly adding more proprietary content.
Dopplr was also one of the earliest backers of Yahoo's Fire Eagle location sharing platform, though the site doesn't seem to make heavy use of these features so far. The most interesting development for Dopplr in the last few months was the addtion of groups, which is a very useful feature for companies that have a lot of employees who travel frequently.
At the same time, though, other travel sites and social networks like PlanetEye, TripIt, or TravelMuse could easily replicate Dopplr's feature set while building on their already extensive backlog of original content.
Comments
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I think Dopplr revolves too much on the social network features. I use it occasionally but my network isn't as built out as it is on other networks like facebook or linkedin. So for my business it's not that entirely useful. Although, one thing I think is good are the people that you run into on there that are helpful and friendly.
I agree that the proprietary content is appealing and that they should do more with it. Like you mention, there are other companies in this area and there is a new one called GoPlanIt that was at TechCrunch50 that showed off automated itinerary planning.
Posted by: JP
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September 15, 2008 12:54 PM
nasıl yane ?
Posted by: fatih | September 15, 2008 7:09 PM
I'm surprised Doppler tries to position itself as a "Business Travel Network" - I've personally never used it as such
also, what happens if LinkedIn decides to incorporate the travel related features into their application? Afterall, the real value is not in a bunch of maps and trip schedules, but in the social network itself, and well - I have 5 buddies on Doopler and 150 on LinkedIn...
Posted by: Business Traveller | September 16, 2008 3:28 AM
I tried out dopplr when they first launched and I think that they have a very easy to use site that I can see frequent business travelers using in order to see who else might be in the same areas that they are.
But, I agree with the comments. What if I don't have my social graph on dopplr? And, what about those who want to go beyond just telling everyone the dates and location of where they are going to be?
That's where several other travel planning start-ups are headed towards, including GoPlanit.com. Not only can users create their own trips by finding things to do using GoPlanit, but our "Plan it" feature will automatically create a personalized trip for you at the click of a button. It takes into consideration popularity and ratings of the item. And, it looks at the location of each recommended item, hours of operation, and friends’ recommendations when creating your custom plan.
For busy business travelers, you can fill in the calendar interface with your meetings and other pertinent items. Then, use "fill in the gaps" for recommendations of things to do that fit into those gaps in your schedule. And, we also offer the social features to keep your friends aware of where you are currently and even what you are doing based on the itineraries that you've created.
Posted by: Jimmy Ku | September 19, 2008 4:30 AM