Type of site | Social network service |
---|---|
Available in | English |
Commercial | Yes |
Launched | 2007 |
Current status | offline |
Dopplr was a free social networking service, launched in 2007, [1] 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 their journeys have produced. The site was named after Christian Doppler, discoverer of the Doppler effect. The company was based in the "Silicon Roundabout" area of London.
First-round angel investors in the site included Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman, Saul Klein and Marko Ahtisaari. Second-round investors in fall 2008 were: Tom Glocer, Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé, Joshua Schachter, Yat Siu and Brian Behlendorf. [2]
A survey carried out in early 2008 on influential technology figures by the Guardian Media Group named Dopplr as a company to watch out for. [3] The Evening Standard named Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones, two of the site's founders, among the thousand most influential people in London in 2007 [4] and again in 2008. [5]
On September 28, 2009, Dopplr announced that they had been acquired by Nokia. [6] 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. [7] 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." [7]
In October 2013, the front page was updated with an announcement that the service would close on 1 November 2013, which it subsequently did.
Newsquest Media Group Ltd. is the second largest publisher of regional and local newspapers in the United Kingdom. It is owned by the American mass media holding company Gannett. It has 205 brands across the UK, publishing online and in print and reaches 28 million visitors a month online and 6.5 million readers a week in print. Based in London, Newsquest employs a total of more than 5,500 people across the UK. It also has a specialist arm that publishes both commercial and business-to-business (B2B) titles such as Insurance Times, The Strad, and Boxing News.
TheGuardian.com, formerly known as Guardian.co.uk and Guardian Unlimited, is a British news and media website owned by the Guardian Media Group. It contains nearly all of the content of the newspapers The Guardian and The Observer, as well as a substantial body of web-only work produced by its own staff, including a rolling news service. As of November 2014, it was the second most popular online newspaper in the UK with over 17 million readers per month; with over 21 million monthly readers, Mail Online was the most popular.
Jayson Tyler Brûlé is a Canadian journalist, entrepreneur, and magazine publisher. He is the editorial director of Monocle.
itv.com is the main website of ITV plc, the UK's largest commercial television broadcaster which operates 13 out of 15 regions on the ITV network under the ITV1 brand. The website offers the ITVX streaming service, with sections for ITV News, certain ITV1 programmes and competitions. STV, which runs the only regions not owned by ITV plc, have their own separate website at stv.tv.
Alice Taylor is a British entrepreneur. She is founder of MakieLab, an "'entertainment playspace for young people' that will invite users to download and print 3D dolls and accessories."
Marko Ahtisaari is a Finnish technology entrepreneur and musician. Ahtisaari has been CEO and co-founder of two technology companies: Dopplr and Sync Project. After the acquisition of Dopplr, Ahtisaari was executive vice president of Design at Nokia and later a Director's Fellow at the MIT Media Lab. He is a composer, bassist and singer in the band Construction.
Wayne McGregor, CBE is a multi award-winning British choreographer and director. He is the Artistic Director of Studio Wayne McGregor and Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet. McGregor was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) 2011 for Services to Dance.
4mations is a website made for people to upload, view and share animated films and games. The site was founded in 2008 by the Channel Four Television Corporation, sponsored by Aardman Animations and Lupus Films. As the site is targeted to adults, risque animations are often featured.
Fire Eagle was a Yahoo! owned service that stores a user's location and shares it with other authorized services. It was created at Yahoo! Brickhouse by a team which included among others Evan Henshaw-Plath, Tom Coates, Simon Willison, Jeannie H. Yang, Mor Naaman, Seth Fitzsimmons, Simon King, and Chris Martin.
Count Erik Wilhelm Wachtmeister is a Swedish Internet entrepreneur. He is the CEO and founder of the social media websites ASmallWorld and Best of All Worlds. In 2012, he was ranked #31 on GQ magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential men in Britain.
Jemima Marcelle Goldsmith is an English screenwriter, television, film and documentary producer and the founder of Instinct Productions, a television production company. She was formerly a journalist and associate editor of The New Statesman, a British political and cultural magazine, and served as the European editor-at-large for the American magazine Vanity Fair.
Taneli Tikka is a Finnish serial entrepreneur and IT influencer.
Bragster was a global social networking and video sharing website on which users dare each other to perform stunts and tasks. The website name stems from the 'Bragging Rights' which are earned on the site. The company is based in London, England. The majority of the content is user generated, although some branded videos from companies such as Tango, Adidas and Wizards of the Coast have been broadcast on the site. The site is designed to be a more niche alternative to other social networking websites. In February 2010 Bragster was acquired by Guinness World Records.
Sir Howard Hugh Panter is a British theatre impresario and theatre operator. With his wife Rosemary Squire he ran the Ambassador Theatre Group from about 1995 until 2016; they remain directors and shareholders of the company. When they left the active management of ATG, they bought Trafalgar Studios, which became the centre of a new company, Trafalgar Entertainment.
Chromaroma was a London-based game using players’ Oyster cards and Barclays Cycle Hire accounts. Points are awarded depending on the stations and journeys users complete on the London Underground and London Buses, as well as using ‘Boris bikes’. It is described by its creators, Mudlark, as “location-based top trumps”, and encourages competition through leaderboards.
Carolyn Dailey is a British-American entrepreneur and commentator. Based in London, she was formerly Time Warner's top executive in Europe. In 2016, she launched Creative Entrepreneurs, a membership-based learning and networking platform to help creative people build successful businesses in the creative industries.
Dame Rosemary Anne Squire, DBE is a British commercial theatre owner and entrepreneur. She was the founder, co-owner and joint chief executive of the Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG) Ltd. Squire and her husband/business partner, Howard Panter, are the second largest shareholder of ATG.
Mudlark was a Sheffield-based production company that developed Chromaroma, a game that used players’ Oyster cards and Barclays Cycle Hire accounts. Points were awarded depending on the stations and journeys users complete on the London Underground and London Buses, as well as using ‘Boris bikes’. It was described by its creators, Mudlark, as “location-based top trumps”, and encouraged competition through leaderboards.
Skimlinks is a content monetization platform for online publishers. It specializes in technology that automatically affiliates product links from publishers' commerce content.
Mike Butcher is a UK-based journalist and editor at large for TechCrunch. He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to technology and journalism.