GigaOM » Dopplr

Dopplr Commits Hara-kiri, Sells to Nokia

Om Malik — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:03:18 +0000

[qi:gigaom_icon_geolocation] At our Mobilize 09 conference, someone joked that Nokia was the Yahoo of the mobile world. I’m sure he meant that Nokia was bereft of direction and purpose. You can also extend that argument to Nokia’s acquisition strategy. The company has been buying up tiny companies, hoping to get a bit of web services magic. Unfortunately, all these acquisitions are like Band-aids applied on a cut carotid artery — they wouldn’t do much good unless Nokia has a platform that’s developed specifically for the mobile Internet.

That’s why I think that Dopplr, a London-based startup that marries location services with the social graph, is committing hara-kiri. The company is rumored to have been acquired by Nokia for between $15 million and $22 million. I’m happy for the founders and backers of Dopplr, after all it is a nice financial outcome for a service that hasn’t grown beyond a base of passionate users. It’s only a matter of time before Nokia mucks up this acquisition, however, much like it has in the past.

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Safeguarding Energy Data Amid the Rise in Consumption Calculation

Mary Catherine O'Connor — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:00:59 +0000

To manage it, you must measure it. That’s the mantra behind both consumer and enterprise carbon accounting initiatives. But to measure their eco-footprint, individuals often must share details about their lifestyles — everything from how often they run their heat or how much water they consume to what personal items they purchase — with service providers. Even if some don’t consider such information hugely confidential, storing this information attached to names or other personally identifiable data makes many people uncomfortable.

Following the boom in e-commerce and online social networking, one thing is painfully clear: Digital identities are powerful tools that can do as much harm as good. Identity theft, often perpetrated through online channels, hurts millions of consumers each year. So how can service providers go about creating digital profiles to detail energy consumption without compromising the security and privacy of the sources of the data? Three factors are key: control/ownership of data, data-sharing standards, and anonymity.

Let Users Opt In

Sharing data is essential to the goal of mapping out the energy consumption — or, as AMEE likes to call it, the energy identity — of everyone and everything. To address privacy concerns upfront, companies such as energy management web site WattzOn.com put the control right into the hands of the user, making the sharing of personal data — and how much data they share — an opt-in effort. That seems like a no-brainer. But that’s not the end of the privacy issue. Generally, people who use services such as WattzOn or sites powered by AMEE want to share their consumption patterns.

Once they’ve opted in, users can log back onto the site and update the number of miles they drive each week, or update their profile to reflect the new Energy Star washing machine they just bought. But that’s a pain, and users want it to be easy for them to track the effectiveness of the changes they make to lower their consumption over time. To address that need, WattzOn offers a real-time tracking service. Users can give WattzOn a look-see at their payment statements and utility bills; the software accesses the data and automatically updates the user’s profile. But now, WattzOn has to ensure the privacy and security of this data.

Use Existing Best Practices

WattzOn works with trusted third parties to access the information — it partners with personal finance management site Wesabe to pull pertinent purchasing data from users’ bank and credit card statements and works with participating utilities to access their meter readings. Once it pulls in this data, WattzOn then uses the same types of best practices and data encryption tools that these third parties use to protect the personally identifiable information of their users, according to WattzOn founding partner Raffi Krikorian.

This approach may work for WattzOn and other providers of personal carbon calculators. But AMEE is undertaking a much more ambitious project: calculating the energy consumption of not just people, but of buildings, products and companies. AMEE works in two ways. Individuals can set up their own profile through AMEE’s site directly or through one of its partners. They can add or remove the information at any time. If they choose, they can also have information added automatically through an RSS feed.

Promote Data Anonymization

Whichever path the user joins the service through, AMEE knows the individual through his or her AMEE ID, but does not collect personally identifiable data unless the user offers this up through metadata in the feed. Consumers are made aware of this, and it’s their choice to include this kind of data. AMEE founder Gavin Starks explains that AMEE doesn’t have any interest in linking consumption data with personal data — it doesn’t even store personally identifiable data in its databases. In fact, AMEE makes data privacy and protection a major focus of its efforts.

From its partners — such as Google, the UK government, Dopplr, etc. — AMEE collects records of individuals’ energy consumption. However, AMEE tracks each person’s record using a unique ID that does not link, in AMEE’s databases, with any personally identifiable data. Here’s how: Each partner collects the consumption data on the individuals in its membership base and then uses AMEE’s API to assign a unique ID to each record, using a key that authenticates each ID. Then each partner sends only a list of IDs and their corresponding consumption data to AMEE.

Whether it’s WattzOn’s work with third parties that are using security and encryption tools developed for e-commerce applications, or AMEE’s focus on keeping users anonymous and following the best practices of Internet privacy, these early drivers of carbon accounting initiatives have set a path for data security that others are likely to follow. Why reinvent the wheel when you could just give it a carbon footprint?

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Well-Traveled Angels Back Dopplr Again

Om Malik — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:49:52 +0000

Dopplr, a travel-focused social network based in Helsinki, has raised an undisclosed amount of money from an investor group led by well-known technology industry insider, Esther Dyson. It was an all-angel round of funding, something we’ve discussed on our FoundRead channel. Apart from Dyson, other investors in the company include Xing founder Lars Hinrichs and de.lici.ous founder Joshua Schachter. Saul Klein, formerly of Skype and currently with Index Partners and Seedcamp, invested again; ~~as did~~ he was joined by Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman and Joichi Ito.

Dopplr, which was started by CEO Lisa Sounio, allows folks to share their travel plans and experiences with others. The company has so far been focused on growing its base in Europe, but the new round of funding is going to help it expand globally. Dopplr claims it can make advertising more effective on its network.

For instance, when travelers tell Dopplr about their travel plans, two-thirds of them have not yet booked a hotel and half have not yet made any travel arrangements, which is a good place for hotels to put up their marketing messages. Dopplr has a long way to go before it becomes mainstream, however, especially if travel search engines decide to introduce their own, Dopplr-type products for their respective user bases. Mobissimo, for example, recently launched MobiFriends, a service that nudges into the Dopplr territory.

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Why Blogs Need To Be Social

Om Malik — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:00:54 +0000

Earlier this week, San Francisco-based web publishing software company Six Apart released the newest version of its flagship product, Moveable Type, and pushed the blogging community into taking the first step toward a very social future.

It is not a new concept — since their early days blogs were all about sociability. Late last year, we backed Chris Messina’s wild idea that WordPress, the open-source blogging software that we use to power majority of our network blogs, could be become the underpinning for a social network. In January, Automattic, the company behind WordPress and the free hosted blogging service WordPress.com, bought BuddyPress to help bring sociability to blogs. (Disclosure: Automattic was started by Matt Mullenweg, a close friend of mine. We share True Ventures as an investor.)

Our friends at ReadWriteWeb theorize that in order for blogging to evolve, the blogging systems need to embrace the newly popular life-streaming services such as Twitter and FriendFeed, along with a growing panoply of personal web services (including the most fabulous, Dopplr). The team at Six Apart has combined the above-mentioned ideas to create Moveable Type Pro, a blog-publishing system with extremely social DNA. (Check out the Six Apart blog for details.)

Blogging Needs To Evolve

Six Apart is making the right move, for it is time for blogging to evolve. Many of us have forgotten that blogging is not just an act of publishing but also a communal activity. It is more than leaving comments; it is about creating connections. For instance, through comments I met folks like Robert Young, who in turn wrote for the blog, and then in the process became a friend. It is time to re-embrace and extend that philosophy.

Establishing those kinds of relationships becomes an even bigger challenge as newer tools emerge, enabling new kinds of sharing. Whether it is Friendfeed or Dopplr, videos or photos, we are constantly figuring out ways to share information about us on the web. In other words, our digital life is spreading out across the web.

Blog = Digital Life Aggregator

We have two choices in order to consolidate these — either opt for all-purpose services such as Facebook (as tens of millions have done) or use our blogs as the aggregation point or hub for all these various services. Facebook, for instance allows you to share photos, aggregate your digital droppings, share comments with friends and exchange messages, but it doesn’t give you a unique identity on the web. In contrast, blogs with social features could allow you to do exactly that.

Marc Canter has been talking about this digital aggregator forever and has been ahead of the curve, though now pieces have started to fall in place. Robert Scoble is a good example of how and where things might be headed. He uses multiple services, and they are all easily consumable on his blog, where he writes longer, more engaging posts. His short conversational posts of yesteryear have migrated to FriendFeed, his video has bifurcated into long-form or live, short-form videos. I know Scoble is an outlier of this trend, but he was also ahead of the curve six years ago as far as blogging is concerned.

The Demographic Shift

As a society, we are entering an increasingly narcissistic phase, enabled by web technologies — a theory that is articulated in Wired’s recent cover story. As the Wired writer quips, “Like it or not, we are all public figures now — famous, as the new cliché goes, for 15 people.”

The evolution of blogging platforms needs to match these societal and demographic changes. I think folks who are blogging now (no, not just tech bloggers) are different from some of us early bloggers — they use different tools and services and have different views of sharing. In many ways MySpace and Facebook have changed what is OK, and what is not OK online.

With that as a sub-text, it is good to see the blogging systems start to evolve. Kudos to Six Apart for making the first major move. Suddenly, blogging tools are more fun — and social.

Open Question: How will you build the next-generation blogging system? I am going to be discussing this question with various attendees of WordCamp 2008 that is being held in San Francisco this weekend. I am speaking at the camp and have a exciting announcement as well.

PS: Get ready for BlogActionDay.org by registering your blogs, watch the new video, and become part of the movement that is about blogs making a change in our world.

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Review: Nokia Sports Tracker… Now That's Hot

Jason Harris — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:45:05 +0000

Phone makers these days are packing so many new technologies into their wireless handsets, it’s enough to make you nostalgic for a plain ole phone. Take Nokia’s N95, which has networking technologies including 3G and Wi-Fi, a still/video camera and a GPS module. But all of these features are pointless unless they’re easy to use and are stitched together in a such way as to fit into our daily lives. The best way to do this: software.

Nokia seems to be learning this lesson. A perfect example is Nokia Sports Tracker, which allows people to access statistics and other relevant information on their workouts. For instance, those who walk, run, cycle, or ski can track metrics such as average speed, total distance, altitude, and so on. By starting the application at the beginning of your workout, the program, through the use of GPS, tracks your positions and gathers statistics as you go. Sports Tracker’s latest version also includes the ability to include videos and pictures with your workout by attaching the media from your phone.

Nokia has also released a Sports Tracker beta web site that allows you to create a free account and upload your workouts from your handset directly to the web. There you can display a map of your workout route, average speed, elevation, and a host of other statistics.

But Sports Tracker isn’t just for fitness nuts. Travelers can share data about their trips with family and friends by way of a travel map accompanied by images and videos taken along the way. As Symbian-Guru has suggested, Nokia might want to consider a name change for Nokia Sports Tracker, something like Nokia Travels. Perhaps an integration with Dopplr is something the company should consider as well.

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Tuesday Morning Bag O' Goodies

Om Malik — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:33:31 +0000

Sprint’s acting CEO Paul Saleh speaking at a UBS conference said that spinning off the WiMAX business is an option. “We are looking at ways of attracting capital to that [WiMax] business.”
NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker: “We have to make sure we’re not replacing dollars with pennies.”
AllThingsD: Barry Diller’s IAC and Flixster, the social network for movie-lovers are talking again, after not talking, and talking….Somebody please buy Flixster, so we can all move on.
dopplr is finally going mobile. What took them so long!( via)
VCs are investing in content companies, talent agencies want to be VCs. It is a match made in Hollywood.
For VCs investing in clean tech, a quick word: this ain’t Web 2.0.

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