Nokia has acquired Dopplr, an online community of frequent travellers, giving an early payday for the site’s large group of high-profile backers.

The acquisition is part of Nokia’s plan to create a comprehensive set of services for its mobile devices, including maps, music and gaming.

Dopplr – whose tagline is “where next?” – allows its members to indicate to chosen contacts where they are travelling to.

The two-year-old service informs them which of their online friends are landing in the same city at the same time. It also suggests places to eat, visit and stay based on what travellers and their friends have liked, both at the destination and elsewhere. Last year, its members plotted 0.5m trips, revealing 250,000 potential meetings.

Dopplr had only just begun to commercialise its site, through partnerships with high-end hotel booking sites Mr & Mrs Smith and Tablet Hotels. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but Nokia said that it paid “a fraction” of the €10m ($15m) purchase price reported on Techcrunch last week.

The company is based in east London on what is known locally as Silicon Roundabout for its lively start-up scene. While not achieving the mass-market appeal of other social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, Dopplr is adored by early adopters and the design community, as well as many Nokia employees.

Marko Ahtisaari, Dopplr’s chief executive, was formerly director of design strategy at Nokia and also sits on the board of Artek, a Finnish furniture design group. He is the son of Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

“Nokia’s social location people really share our vision,” said Matt Biddulph, chief technology officer and a co-founder of the site. “They’re all about people and place with mobile. They’ve been building up a great set of people through acquisition over the last couple of years.”

In July, Dopplr released an iPhone application, the “Social Atlas”, which uses the iPhone’s GPS and Dopplr’s community to recommend nearby places to go.

Nokia entered the mapping market with its $8.1bn acquisition of Navteq in 2007. It has since acquired many smaller location-based services companies, including Plazes, a social network, last year and Acuity, a mobile advertising provider, earlier this month.

A year ago, Dopplr announced it had received angel funding from Tom Glocer, Thomson-Reuters chief executive; Tyler Brûlé, founder of style magazines Wallpaper* and Monocle, and an FT columnist; Esther Dyson, a WPP board member and backer of many well-known start-ups including Flickr and Evernote; and Lars Hinrichs, founder of Xing, the European business networking site.

Other backers include Saul Klein of investor groups Index Ventures and The Accelerator Group; Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, the US-based business networking site; and Martin Varsavsky, a veteran telecoms entrepreneur behind Fon, a WiFi-sharing community.

Mr Varsavsky said in a blog post about the acquisition: “I believe that an integration of the service with Nokia phones would make a lot of sense. A mobile Dopplr is the ultimate pocket travel guide.”

He added: “Nokia continues to be the number one technology company in Europe and Europe needs a strong Nokia. And where Nokia is weak is in services, in software small acquisitions make sense.”

The Nokia sale is a good outcome for Martin, Marko and the rest of Dopplr’s far-flung family. But the takeover seems rather early in the company’s young life.

Dopplr’s team have always thought bigger thoughts about personal data and the social web - and articulated them better - than many London start-ups. What at first seemed more like a feature than a business was, with the Social Atlas concept, just starting to take off. I hope Dopplr’s style and ideas continue to thrive within Nokia.

Tags: dopplr, nokia

September 28, 2009 7:01pm in Consumer Electronics, Digital media, Europe, Mobile, Tech | Comment