The damn ink isn’t even dry on the Dopplr acquisition by Nokia that everyone said would never happen (it did). And yet, we’re now hearing rumors that Nokia is quietly looking for a buyer to take the travel social network off their hands.
Whoa. What? The deal was announced on September 24. It’s been less than a month. Not even eBay throws away acquisitions that quickly.
According to our source, all Nokia really wanted from the acquisition was the team, particularly CEO Marko Ahtisaari (formerly a star Nokia guy) and CTO Matt Biddulph. Suddenly, Mike Butcher’s article about the deal on TechCrunch Europe makes a lot of sense.
They may actually want to keep the mobile stuff, too, which will be useful for future Nokia products.
But the main Dopplr site is now up for grabs, from what we hear. So if you’re in the market for a really nice travel social network, give Nokia a call.
OMG it’s like returning a pair of Manolos that are totally already over.
totally
Does it cost less now that it’s “second hand”?
it was right from the beginning a mistake to buy all those unhealthy startups like dopplr and cellity..
cellity was right before they went bankrupt and dopplr nobody leads the team in berlin..
the nightmare at nokia will go on..
as soon as apple will terminate exklusivity with operator they are going to kill NOKIA.
its all about a great management disaster.
Yes, you are correct. Few days before I was using cellity to send free SMS. Recently I experienced a few problems in sending SMS through cellity. I have downloaded Messmo on my mobile and it is working well for me.
The Dopplr service does have style.
I still think a great market for social visiting services would be to apply it within corporate calendaring and highly distributed sales teams where you could increase serendipitous face to face time. i.e. a while you are there approach to travel
Sadly, no service gets that right (yet).
Dropplr
You win.
/bows
I never used the service myself. Interesting tech but not all that practical for normal folks.
Acquire to hire is so hot these days.
+1
Um, wow, that was quick.
It’s fun running a startup after all.. but if rumors are true Dopplr is about to be not fun anymore
Nokia should first try to get their phones to support standards (ex: HTML Emails in Mail for Exchange LOL) and they should take a little look at Cupertino how to make great phones – ehh… future devices.
no,no,No, NO,NO, No, YES…. Is it really all about putting the golden handcuffs on Ahtisaari and Biddulph? To get two guys to join your executive team you spend €15m? What collective brainpower do they think A & B can bring to NOKIA to save the day? To innovate the dying NOKIA is a MONUMENTAL task that these two will not be able to accomplish unless they become the CEO and the CTO, which is when you really have power to change things in an organisation.
This is the most ludicrous deal I’ve seen lately.
They didn’t spend €15m, that was the “rumored” amount from TC. According to this bloomberg article they spent “significantly less”. I was privy to an almost identical deal once and they paid a few hundred thousand for the assets but most of the deal was to give the founders a sweet salary…
http://www.bloo...id=aX2Rs7xlgCP0
Who would want to buy Dopplr now that Nokia has cheery picked the team that made it such a success?
I can only see this being a good purchase from someone with an existing platform of travel related products, but even then that would mean Dopplr would start to become something it never set out to do.
Someone that’s interested in an active userbase? I’d like to have it movie it in a direction I feel would be beneficial.
I think the real mistake of Nokia was the acquisition of Twango, 100 M u$ basically for nothing.
The Doppler acquisition was cheap and they think the visionare skill of founders worth, and they can even get some money selling the service to make even cheaper “that hiring proccess”, what wrong with that ?
A lot. Basically you don’t understand a thing about what drives founders. If their pride & joy is flushed down the toilet, you can reassign them all you want to other internal projects at Nokia, but they’re not going to be passionate about it- certainly not after a heady startup and exit. They’ll be working on side projects, possibly a new startup, until their contractual obligations are over, phoning it in (contracts specify length of labor not intensity), until they can check out. Nokia appears to be badly mismanaged.
callywog, at least we now know what kind of character you have. And we also know you are a mental midget. Get back to us when you truely understand the nature of business, you have a lot of work to do!
Who can I contact Mike?
Seriously!
Please DM @showmefunny
sounds like the #friendfeed model from facebook!
Does anyone else remember that need web-scraping tool they made a long while back?
It would let you pick reegions of a web page w/mouse, then turn that into an rss feed. It was pretty neat, but had stability issues, would have been neat to do more with it and y! Pipes.
Called it!