on 28 September 2009 
(No Ratings Yet)In a short blog post Dopplr has this morning confirmed that its rumoured sale to Nokia has completed successfully. The announcement contains this line:
Nokia shares our vision of the Social Atlas, the idea that social location data can improve our experience of cities.
I am interested in this concept of the Social Atlas but best to leave the description to Dopplr themselves:
There are plenty of great sites out there where you can find subjective reviews and star-ratings of places round the world. We wanted to do something different, building lists of the best places ranked by everything that we know about the traveller.
Because of our existing community, we already know all sorts of things about our travellers’ habits – for example, we know who visits New York most often, and we know who lives in Europe. These “opinionated lists” would tell us things like where Europeans eat in Tokyo, or where frequent visitors to New York stay compared to people visiting for the first time.
Taking into account these sort of factors, we can build aggregated views based on the wisdom of particular crowds. It can be interesting to see “people who visit X also go to Y” statements.
Discovering a city starting with places you already know is a great way to improve your local knowledge, but what if you’re new to a city? The Social Atlas has another mechanism to help sort and sift the combined knowledge of Dopplr travellers. We calculate lists of places that aren’t just ordered by plain popularity, but take into account the travel experience and social interconnectedness of people who visit.
So it’s about the data. Interconnected data.
One of the challenges with Dopplr is that it relies heavily on the network effect. The network, collectively, becomes more useful the more people join. This is true of most social networks.
Cloud travel itineraries
Putting aside the specifics of Dopplr’s Social Atlas what their platform is really about is storing your travel itinerary in the cloud. Once the data is “out there” you can start to find interesting uses for it.
Dopplr are by no means alone when it comes to cloud based itinerary storage. TripIt for example is a strong category leader. The difference with TripIt is that the utility to a single traveller on a single trip is immediately obvious.
No need to keep pumping data into the cloud hoping that the hyped networked effect will kick in at some future point as you do with Dopplr.
Super PNR for direct bookings
Where I think we are going with cloud based itinerary storage is towards a Super PNR (Passenger Name Record) concept.
Imagine the future where travellers research and book directly online via a variety of supplier websites. At that point we need some glue (or perhaps a bucket) to store this itinerary data in one place.
Independent services, with access controls (eg perhaps using OpenID) could access that data and provide either personalised travel advice, latest transport news, suggest other products, give you coupon codes etc etc
Imagine an open eco-system of travel applications just like Facebook or iPhone applications all feeding and updating a central cloud hosted Super PNR.
Does this sound far fetched? Look at what Google have done with centralised records in Google Health. If you can do this with health records it can be achieved with travel records.
Sadly that isn’t what Dopplr were building. I don’t think that TripIt are building that either! The concept is too big for a startup…. an existing player who believes in direct bookings (rather than distributed bookings) is needed to put their weight (and money) behind it.
If this Cloud Super PNR existed then I expect Dopplr would have been one of the most successful applications using it. But it doesn’t, so they aren’t…. but as with many entrepreneurial ideas the Dopplr concept has shown us the future…. just we collectively haven’t understood it yet.
Related posts:
I think this idea is fascinating too… I’d disagree slightly with you Alex… “The network, collectively, becomes more useful the more people join. This is true of most social networks.” I see what you mean – you need a critical mass for it to become really useful – ie have breadth of coverage (eg Trip Advisor suddenly got REALLY useful when it hit the 5 million review mark or whatever) but for something like Dopplr which has a quite tightly defined niche (Frequent Business Travellers) you don’t want say students or mums with kids getting into the mix here as their interests/choices would be radically at odds with those of the rest of the network
Imagine a SuperPNR capability that functioned much like SalesForce: SaaS, with core capability but meeting the unique needs of many. An open Super PNR service would reduce overall industry costs and provide a foundation for new products and services, not to mention better service to the customer.
Hi Bob
Yes – thats it! [I worried that no one understood what I was getting at]
Would also enable new entrant entrepreneurs to do transactional services (or provide services that interact with a transaction).
That would set off a whole new wave of innovation (currently new entrant entrepreneurs tend to go for social or inspiration / product review type sites – but this would give them something else to innovate with)
Alex, Your concept of the ‘Cloud Super PNR’ is exactly what we are building with Traxo (www.traxo.com), although we’ve been using several other names to describe the service (and associated benefits).
Traxo currently auto-detects, validates (traveler name match), unlocks, normalizes, de-dups, centralizes, sequences, and intelligently re-assembles (it back into logical ‘trips’) confirmed travel reservation information from over 40 travel sources. Since direct-connects / APIs / web-services don’t yet exist for reservation information we’ve employed the same approach that Mint.com and Yodlee have uses to aggregate financial information. And, as you can imagine, with centralization comes added responsibility, so we’ve spent an incredible amount of time building the appropriate security / privacy / sharing tools directly into our base system.
We just launched our public beta last month. Please take a look at the site. I would love to compare notes and visions for how this service unfolds. Let’s plan to chat later this / next week?
Regards,
Andres
(Traxo Co-founder)
I have some questions… I know this is all speculative, but how would the system determine if the passenger is allocentric or psychocentric? would this just be based on patterns and algorithms? You would also have to overcome the fear of sharing that seems to be industry standard which could be a bit of a challenge. I do think it would be a step in the right direction, would get rid of a lot of speculation.
Graham
That is a very interesting question and one I am wholly ill-equipped to answer (neither having an MBA nor a degree in tourism studies!)
I am just a techie with a vision! [Spells danger that!]
But that is like asking a shopping trolley/basket if it vegetarian. A shopping basket surely doesn’t care what is in it – it is just a container designed for convenience to shop with.
Think of this Cloud super PNR idea as a bucket that data can be put into, can be peeked into, and data removed from. It would be down to the individual what travel services they wish to give permission to access their PNR – hence it would reflect the real world mindset of the traveller.
Andres
I like the look of your site but it isn’t quite the same idea (having taken a quick look). But maybe you could do it (but you would have to take a much more of a platform strategy than a site one…. looks like you are going the site one initially?
Interesting. It sounds like a (bigger) question I was trying to answer today about who, in this digital age, SHOULD own which pieces of my personal information and how I, as an enduser, can control for what purpose that is used.
The way I see it, the problem isn’t unique for travel records:
I run Google Maps (and have Latitude enabled) on my mobile phone. My location is thus shared with all my other (approved) Google contacts.
However, there is no way for me to share that information with my Facebook account or my Twitter account unless I run additional, other tools.
It applies to my GPS Location (Google Latitude), my latest thoughts (Twitter), my friends (Facebook), my pictures (Flickr), my restaurant reviews (ZAGAT), a list of my books (in Amazon) and a list of my favorite movies (in IMDB), etc.
The solution here is what you refer to as a “bucket”. I would need a digital bucket in which I put my “stuff”: GPS information, recent pictures, my travel itinerary, etc.
Ofcourse, like OpenID, it would be up to me to decide where to “park” my bucket and who I give access to it.
Applications and companies can request access (to read or write) under conditions (approved my be).
I’m probably overreaching here, but I’m trying to make the point that it’s not only the travel industry that needs such a solution.
And: I think it’s a pipedream that any big company would pick this up voluntarily any time soon, since the ‘lock in’ is (in my examples) what allows them to make the tools/services/sites in the first place.