There are now mobile pages for eating, staying in and exploring the world’s cities – for example, where do smart travellers eat in London? The search engine has been upgraded and can now find things in your trips notes and in the Social Atlas. We’ve made subtle and tasteful improvements to the styling throughout. And if all you want to do is browse for a place to stay, you don’t even need a Dopplr account.

To see where people on Dopplr go, you can visit the Shepherdess in London, Hakaniemen Halli in Helsinki, or the Hotel on Rivington in New York. We like these places, and we trust you’ll like them too.

The acquisition does not change the current Dopplr service which is available at Dopplr.com and on platforms where Dopplr is integrated, like Flickr and Twitter. As always, if you so wish, you can get a copy of your data from your account.

Early on after we launched the Dopplr private beta to a small crowd of international friends and industry colleagues, I posted a screenshot of some graphs on Flickr. The graphs showed sparklines of real travel patterns to major world cities, and in the description I wrote “I’m so excited about what we’ll be able to do with the dopplr dataset in the future.” Now Dopplr is a well-established site, we’re thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to wield data as a tool to make better services.

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, but we also have a global view:

The Shepherdess is a cafe in East London that’s popular with internet startups from the local area (us included). From the recommendation above we can see that these people are just as selective when they travel, visiting high-end coffee roasters and exclusive ice-cream bars when in San Francisco.

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 if you have a strong network of travellers who share trips with you, or you’ve spent a lot of time in a particular city, we take that into account when adding your data to the mix. This results in lists like the following for Austin hotels, which places the Hotel San Jose right at the top. Despite (or perhaps because of) its size and location, it beats large and popular hotels like the Hilton amongst savvy Dopplr travellers, who enjoy its serene atmosphere during the bustle of SXSW.

It only takes a couple of clicks to set up. Once your XING and Dopplr accounts are linked, a badge will automatically appear on your XING home page showing your planned trips and network activities.

Dopplr knows where your fellow travellers are going, but it can also talk directly to your XING account. That means it spots co-incidences with your XING contacts who are on Dopplr, highlighting when you and they will be in the same place at the same time.

Dopplr badges also appear on your XING canvas and profile views, displaying your current and planned trips, your contacts’ trips, and recommended places that people have discovered en route. You can display a map of your travels; add new trips, and much more.

We’re often asked for more ways to share Dopplr trips and expand travellers’ networks to reach more people, so we hope this new feature will be useful.

If you already have a XING account and would like to connect it to Dopplr, click this link. (If you’re not on XING, you might like to find out more about it.)

As always, we value your feedback .Please get in touch with your questions and comments about this, or any other aspect of using Dopplr.

The app puts the combined knowledge of the world’s smart travellers in your pocket. Wherever you are in the world, you can use it to find nearby recommended places to eat, stay and explore. If you make new discoveries of your own, you can add them to the Social Atlas with a few taps of your finger. And every new addition helps to expand the Social Atlas, which is starting small but growing rapidly with the input from Dopplr travellers using their mobile devices.

You don’t even need an account at Dopplr.com to use the app. The built-in directory of city tips and advice works for everyone.

But if you do have a Dopplr account, the application offers a rich social location-based experience. You can keep in touch with your fellow travellers, find out what city and timezone they are in, and what future trips they have planned. You can view your own planned trips, and find co-incidences when fellow travellers will be nearby. You can even contact them directly from inside the app.

Many of you have requested that we make the Social Atlas mobile. This iPhone application is the first step. Dopplr will make the Social Atlas available on all major mobile location-based devices in 2009 including Nokia, Blackberry and Google Android.

The Europas, the TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, are held today July 9 in London. Over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry and these results merged with those from 19 expert advisors.

You can watch the live stream here starting 6pm London time/GMT (10am San Francisco, 1pm New York, 8pm Helsinki).

For more recent media coverage on Dopplr please see our press section.

You can find out the machine tag to use by checking the Flickr sidebar on any Dopplr place page, as illustrated here:

screenshot by moleitau.

screenshot by moleitau.

You can read the full in-depth details on the Flickr Code Blog.

For more, please see the latest research on how the growing dopplr community worldwide travels and shares travel advice.

Since we introduced the idea of the Social Atlas earlier this year, the growing Dopplr community has shared tens of thousands of interesting places in cities around the world. What kind of places? Unique hotels. Good restaurants and cafés. Well-known and little-known delights to explore.

Wherever you see a place on Dopplr you can click on the green “+” next to it to say you’ve been there. If it was an especially good place, click a second time to say you’ve been there and liked it. If you want to undo all of this, just click a third time.

But what if you can’t find the place you have in mind? Now you can easily add the unique places you’ve found to Dopplr. Every city, for example Barcelona, has Eat, Stay and Explore sections, and each section has an ‘add a place‘ link which allows you to tell everyone about your own places in that city.

Dopplr will remember all the places you’ve marked, which means it’s easy for you to find them again the next time you repeat that journey. Your tips will also be shared with your network, saving them time and hassle next time they’re in the same area.

Over time, we can anonymise and aggregate all the recommendations that have been added to Dopplr. This is the Social Atlas itself: think of it as “pop charts” for cities around the world reflecting the collective knowledge of smart travellers. It’s still early days, but we are very excited by the potential.

1. Willing to share travel intention, long before the trip
2. International
3. Independent early adopters of digital technologies
4. Compared to traditional frequent travellers: younger, earn more, travel more
5. Preference for unique hotels
6. For airlines, preference is widely spread
7. Recommendations rule

1. Willing to share travel intention, long before the trip

When people share a trip through Dopplr 2/3 have not yet booked a hotel and 1/2 have not made any travel arrangements at all (e.g. plane or train reservations). Dopplr is of course all about sharing where you will be and the unique places you’ve been. What surprised us is how early in the decision process people share their trips. Dopplr use is clearly part of a larger trend of declarative living – alongside services like Twitter and the status line in Facebook – where Dopplr emphasizes future location and privacy. For an excellent description of this broad phenomenon read Clive Thompson’s “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy.”

2. International

Dopplr may have the most international social graph of any social network. Over half the people on Dopplr share trips with a person from another country. Over 2/3 of the users are from outside of the United States with half of the users coming from Europe, and Asia Pacific growing quickly.

London, New York, San Francisco, Paris and Berlin are the top destination cities. However, as the plot of all Dopplr destinations in 2008 at the very top of this post shows, the tail of destinations is long and covers the entire globe.

3. Independent early adopters of digital technologies

Dopplr users are, no surprise, early adopters of online services with three-quarters claiming regular use of Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter and over half using Flickr or their own blog regularly. They are very independent in terms of making travel arrangements with 3/4 making their travel arrangements themselves either online or by phone.

4. Compared to traditional frequent travellers: younger, earn more, travel more

Dopplr travellers are highly-educated and compared to traditional frequent travellers they are younger, earn more, and travel more. Active travellers on Dopplr made on average 15 trips in the last year. In terms of sectors IT, telecoms, marketing, media and creative industries are over-represented in Dopplr travellers compared to traditional frequent travellers.

Dopplr users are more used to booking directly online with 80% booking directly on an airline website (compared with 30% for traditional frequent travellers).

5. Preference for unique hotels

Dopplr travellers prefer unique travel experiences with over 40% going for boutique hotels when they travel and 25% choosing a trusted chain. As for trusted hotel chains, the top six preferred chains for frequent business travellers on Dopplr were Hilton, W Hotels, Mariott, Starwood, Hyatt and Radisson.

6. For airlines, preference is widely spread

Broadly speaking the digital influencers on Dopplr are highly driven by price and recommendation. They are less loyal than traditional frequent travellers and their preferences for airlines are spread among many more airlines. As an example, for long haul business Dopplr travellers prefer Brittish Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa and United Airlines. In terms of airports AMS, SIN and HKG top the list.

7. Recommendations rule

Travellers on Dopplr are highly interested in and influenced by recommendations from their peers, especially for hotels, restaurants and places to see. The chart below shows claimed influence of recommendations on different travel decisions.

And people are increasingly receiving travel recommendations through digital channels, whether it be all-purpose communication platforms like Facebook, Email or Twitter, or newer more focused platforms like Dopplr. Face-to-face is still by far the most popular medium for travel recommendations, so digital platforms have a lot of potential for growth.

In light of the above observations, you can see why we at Dopplr are excited about building the social atlas, a system for making travel data and advice more open and sharable. Many thanks to all of you who have contributed to our research.

Note: The data above is based on two traveller surveys conducted over the last year (the second with m1ndset), m1ndset independent research into international frequent travellers at airports around the world, and analysis of aggregate travel patterns of the Dopplr community. We will be sharing a full version of our research results shortly. If you’re interested in receiving a copy drop us a line at business(at)dopplr(dot)com.