Nokia To Acquire Dopplr | Hacker News Reader

Nokia To Acquire Dopplr

techcrunch.com

18 pointspclark11 comments

>> " The site has never grown to huge usage, but core users are passionate about the service"

I never really understand how these things manage to sell for so much, having so few users.

>> "Dopplr cofounder and CEO Marko Ahtisaari was previously the Director of Design Strategy at Nokia."

Oh... I see...

Marko Ahtisaari's primary credential is that he's the son of former Finnish president (and Nobel Peace Prize laureate) Martti Ahtisaari.

Dopplr always seemed like a startup that's been tailor-designed for a Nokia acquisition exit. Glad to see it worked out for them.

Dopplr's kind of cool, but I'm still looking for the right thing:

I travel occasionally, and in reality, it's not my circle of friends that needs to be informed, it's the people that I could potentially meet somewhere. For instance, I'm part of Debian (although I really ought to officially retire) and the Apache Software Foundation. There are lists where I can mention that I'm going to be somewhere, and more often than not, it turns out there's someone from there who is happy to meet up. Or the other way around: when people visit Padova (or wherever I happen to be living), I'd be happy to go out and chat about whatever topic we have in common. I want something that lets me get in touch, in a casual and no obligations way, with people who I have something in common with. I suppose that it's never going to be perfect because you can't force all the people from various lists to sign up for some service, but I think it could be improved.

Hi David -- There are a few sites like that. You could try travbuddy.com if you are interested in meeting travelers by location or showing them around your hometown, although it has less of a tech slant. couchsurfing.org has more of a backpacking focus, but they also have regular meet-ups around the world.

As Om Malik said http://gigaom.com/2009/09/23/dopplr-commits-hara-kiri-sells-... -- this kind of feels like death for Dopplr. Can we name a great Nokia web service or software?

or it was a very clever move for Nokia to pick up some class product talent to teach them the ways.

Dopplr is a stunning service, Nokia can (and should) learn a lot from them. The CEO is ex-Nokia too.

I use Ovi to put my MP3s on line. It's really good!

I'm hoping mixing dopplr's well designed site with Nokia's resources will create a powerful site, but this will probably lead to the death of dopplr.

I'd love to know what caused so many high profile entrepreneurs to get involved with Dopplr. Hoffman, joshu, Saul Klein, Martin Varsavsky.

I imagine, as people who travel a lot, they found the service extremely useful. It's also a really classy service, and the founders were well almost certainly known to the investors already.

Exactly.

I'd been thinking of wanting something like this (I thought of it as a "social network for airports") for a while, so when I heard about it I was interested.

I would hardly call myself "high profile" BTW.

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