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.

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The purchase price, we’ve heard, is between €10 million and €15 million ($15 million – $22 million based on current exchange rates). Dopplr cofounder and CEO Marko Ahtisaari was previously the Director of Design Strategy at Nokia.

We first covered Dopplr in 2007 when it closed on seed funding. The site has never grown to huge usage, but core users are passionate about the service, which lets them share travel plans with friends. And they’ve supposedly raised just €1.25 million or so in total funding.

Dopplr was about to close a new round of funding when Nokia swooped in for the buy.

Update: TechCrunch Europe has more analysis.

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The app appears first on the iPhone, but apps for Nokia, Blackberry and Google Android platforms are also in the pipeline. The app is available from the iTunes store here. There is plenty of content inside the app pulled from Dopplr’s own content as well as your social network. The question mark with Dopplr is how it will continue to fair against Tripit, which is tearing along at a fast pace and recently launched premium flight monitoring and alerts.

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Are you looking for the best beer bars in the world, good places to make out in San Francisco, or where to go on the Big Island in Hawaii? A travel recommendation site called nextstop mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputation system and elements of gameplay to come up with a new social online travel guide.

The site has been in beta for a few months, although it hasn’t gotten much attention yet. It was started by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who helped launch Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picassa (Graham). A third co-founder, Charles Lin, was a Stanford classmate of Graham’s. The site grew out of their frustration with finding interesting things to do in unfamiliar places. “It is difficult to discover something new when you don’t know what to look for,” says Sjogreen.

Everything on nextstop is geared towards getting people to recommend their favorite places and organize those recommendations into guides. There are various ways to explore the site, including a search box, by city, a guide view, or a map view (see screen shots below). The recommendations can be collected together into guides (like this one for an architecture tour), which can be explicitly “liked” by members. The guides can be sorted by most recent, most liked, or most viewed. You can save any place or guide in a wishlist for later viewing.

But it is the social aspects which give the site an extra edge. Each recommendation acts as a vote (for any given place, you can see how many people recommend it) and you can also vote individual recommendations up and down. Every member gets a reputation score. You get 2 points every time somebody else votes up one of your recommendations, and 15 points when they “like” one of your guides. To fight spam, your reputation score goes down every time somebody votes down one of your recommendations or flags one of your entries. Entries can also be edited wiki-style. Still, it would be fairly easy to game the system with a few friends.

The members with the most points get recognized on a leaderboard. And you can follow any other member, which lets you see all of their entries and actions on the site in an activity stream (which you can export to other services as an RSS feed). In addition to the reputation points, members can also earn “badges” for accomplishing certain goals, such as being the first to recommend a place, for getting 100 views on a guide, or 10 likes. Any recommendation can be shared via email, Facebook or Twitter (but sharing is not automatic, it has to be explicitly selected for each recommendation). Individual guides can also be shared as embeddable badges or widgets.

The site makes very simple to create a recommendation. These are not meant to be in-depth reviews, rather curated suggestions of things to do. It uses a combination of search APis from Google (for local search, geo-location, image search, and maps) and Yahoo Boss (also for image search) to help you find and auto-complete many of the items that go into each recommendation.

Once you create an account or sign in using Facebook Connect, you can type in the name of practically any bar, restaurant, tourist attraction, or business after clicking “add a recommendation.” It will suggest places it recognizes along with their addresses, and if one of them is what you are trying to recommend, you click on it and nextstop will place it on a Google map and find pictures. You pick an image, add a short Twitter-length recommendation no more than 160 characters, and categorize it as a place to eat/drink, stay/sleep, or do/explore along with an approximate price range (free, inexpensive, mid-range, high-end). Then the recommendation is created and other people can find it on the site. I did this for a restaurant in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bar Tabac, and it found it immediately, along with a great picture.

There is plenty of competition for online travel guides and social recommendations, starting with TripAdvisor and Yelp down to a bevy of startups including Dopplr, Offbeat Guides and TripSay. But nextstep manages to do things a little bit different. It is not trying to be comprehensive, it is just trying to provide travelers a highly selective and vetted list of things to do and places to visit.

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Cubic Telecom, the TechCrunch40 company behind the traveler-friendly SIM card MAXroam, has partnered with Dopplr to sell the card through its online store. The Dopplr-branded SIM card will be available for a reduced rate of €45 (down five euro from its normal price).

Both companies have a strong travel focus: Cubic Telecom’s MAXroam allows users to use their unlocked cell phones in over 180 countries, saving around 60-80% on roaming charges. Dopplr offers a social network for travelers looking to meet up with their friends. The site will use your travel schedule to determine when you’ll be in the same area as a friend, and then help you set up a get-together.

While the new partnership may not sound like much, this is actually a big win for MAXroam, which likely has a hard time connecting with business travelers (try doing a Google search for ‘cheap SIM travel’ – there are countless competitors, though most of them work differently). Dopplr’s userbase consists largely of frequent travelers who are likely to show interest in the special SIM cards. They still might be turned off by the specifics of MAXroam’s program (the site offers video tutorials, but it can be a little confusing), but the prospect of saving big bucks is a strong motivator.

We should note that Offbeat Guides, which we covered last night, also has a partnership with Dopplr and is available on the Dopplr store.

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An airline moving into social networking is interesting, so we decided to take a look and see how it compares to internet startups who are looking to monetize social platforms catered to travelers. Unfortunately, in this case, it turns out to be not much more than a marketing exercise.

In terms of features, Bluenity doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but you’ll find all the necessary basics: you can edit both your leisure and business profile and you get to share your regular departure airport, favorite destinations, number of flights you take per year, and countries you’ve visited in the past. Bluenity lets users interact with other members, connects to their Facebook profile and enables users to share travel tips with each other. I think they would have been better off integrating tips and reviews from other travel communities that have been around for years and offer valuable content in abundance (e.g. TripAdvisor) and letting you choose which profile (e.g. LinkedIn) you would like to point to.

I also suspect they will moderate the hell out of the service because their Traveler Charter reads “the Bluenity community encourages travelers to choose good humor over conflict and positive advice over negative criticism. Optimism and enthusiasm are essential to maintaining a friendly atmosphere.” So honesty is fine, just be positive when you’re being critical. Right.

(Stowe Boyd even had his profile picture rejected because it was pixelated.)

I still like Dopplr better (other comparable services include TripIt, TravelMuse, TripSay and more), because it doesn’t make a distinction about which airline you’ve chosen to travel with—if you were in doubt, Bluenity only lets you share trips that includes one of Air France-KLM’s flights—and are open to include relevant information and multimedia content from third-party sources (e.g. photos from Flickr) rather than keeping the network a walled garden. Another major advantage to using something like Dopplr instead, is that the service leverages your existing relationship rather than trying to get you to hook up with total strangers.

What’s odd about Bluenity is that it displays travel tips and comments about hotels, restaurants, and attractions in all the languages the service is available in: French, Dutch and English, even when you indicate in which language you would like to browse the social network.

Last but not least, I think it’s a shame that they decided to boast about being the very first airline to launch a social platform for travelers, when that is clearly not the truth (cases in point: British Airways has Metrotwin while Lufthansa operates both GenerationFly and GenFlyLounge).

To conclude: I think there’s value in airlines engaging their customers in a more social way, as long as they realize that people are generally not loyal to either one airline company nor to a single social network. But it would be better for airlines to launch platforms that are open, or plug into existing communities by partnering with social networking services who have been doing a great job at building and maintaining groups of travelers for years now. Otherwise the barriers to adoption are just too great. Would you want to be friends with the people sitting next to you on a plane? No, you want to get away from those people as soon as the plane lands.

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Dopplr, an invite-only social network for sharing travel plans with friends, has announced early-stage financing of an undisclosed amount from Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein.

The social network bills itself as useful for people who travel at more than five times per year and want to inform friends of where they plan to go. The greatest benefit from sharing travel plans seems to come from discovering when friends will be in the areas of the world you plan to visit. If you decide to take a trip to London, for example, and one of your friends currently lives there, Dopplr will notify you of that fact.

While not yet open to the public, the company claims that Dopplr’s users have already shared 110 million kilometers (70 million miles) of trips to over 2000 cities around the world.

The investors in this round of funding have financed other notable companies such as Last.fm, Joost, FON, LinkedIn, Flickr, Technorati, Wikia, Xing, Stardoll, Six Apart and Netvibes.

Want or have an invitation to Dopplr? Head over to InviteShare.

Thanks for the screenshot David.

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