Dopplr
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Dopplr was a social travel network founded in 2007. Members shared their personal and business travel plans privately with their networks and surfaced recommendations on places to stay, eat, and explore in cities around the world, which the company presented as a collective-intelligence 'Social Atlas' of the world's most frequent travelers.
02 / Dopplr FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Dopplr was acquired by Nokia in September 2009, and the acquisition effectively killed the product. Nokia put the service into maintenance mode in September 2010 and never developed it further: the blog stopped being updated days after the acquisition, monthly unique users fell from 39,000 to 29,000, and the founders moved into Nokia roles. With no new features and a frozen product, the service announced its closure in October 2013 and shut down on November 1, 2013.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
the social travel service would be discontinued as of 1 Nov 2013 after the 2009 Nokia acquisition.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
The company was acquired by Nokia in September 2009; no financial terms were publicly disclosed.
- 02
Nokia put the service into maintenance mode in September 2010 and discontinued development.
- 03
The service announced its closure in October 2013 and shut down on November 1, 2013.
- 04
No public disclosure of wind-down finances or creditor arrangements was found.