The slow death of Dopplr

Founded in Finland early in 2007, Dopplr was the great white, beautiful hope of the UK startup scene; a well-respected design and development team, and a service that imaginatively and stylishly captured the zeitgeist of business, travel and location services.

It published annual travel summaries for users and included their carbon output. It boosted the profile of money-spinning conferences. And – of most interest to potential investors – it attracted a wealthy, technophile and evangelical base of "upscale" business users. Backers included Esther Dyson, Tyler Brule, Joshua Schachter, Lars Hinrichs and Reid Hoffman. So what could go wrong?

In a word: Nokia.

The Finnish mobile manufacturer, which sells more phones than any other company, paid a rumoured $20m (give or take a few million) for the service almost exactly a year ago, with a deal that closed on 28 September, 2009.

Since then, Dopplr has fallen completely out of the web's view. Its blog has not been updated since two days after the acquisition. While Dopplr was too young to have grown a large user base, the Nokia acquisition could, with some imagination, have given it scale. Instead, comScore shows its monthly unique user numbers falling from 39,000 in September 2009 to 29,000 in July this year.

While the Guardian has been told that Dopplr's back-end system is still being maintained, its front-of-house appears woefully neglected, with no sign of the much-admired annual travel reports. Even if this was purely a talent acquisition, with the company bought for its staff, why allow the site to wither on the vine?

Dopplr's design chief Matt Jones had already left, joining Schulze & Webb (reincarnated as Berg) but still tied to Dopplr one day a month as a design advisor. Jones already had close to ties with Nokia as a former director of UX design there. Not only that, chief executive Marko Ahtisaari became senior vice president for design at Nokia, chief tech officer Matt Biddulph and developer Tom Insam both moved to Nokia's base in Berlin as strategist and developer respectively and are still there, working out lock-in periods.

At the time of the acquisition, people only saw possibility. "I'm guardedly optimistic that Nokia is smart enough to know not screw up a truly elegant service," wrote Dopplr user Chad in response to the news. Duncan Semple added: "I just hope the service won't get neglected or changed too much to fit with Nokia's other services." Trickles of comments this year have variously asked if anyone is still listening — and, echoing in an empty blog, talked of transferring to rival service TripIt.

Despite numerous requests over a number of weeks for comment about its plans for Dopplr, Nokia has not responded.

Since the launch of its Ovi internet services brand in August 2007 – soon after Apple's game-changing iPhone went on sale – Nokia has made a series of acquisitions to try and offer more social media and location features for its mobile phones. The results, however, are far from compelling.

In June 2008, Nokia acquired social activity service Plazes, saying the "visionary team" and "key assets" would allow it to extend its context-based services. The service is still operational — but has not been integrated with Ovi.

Nokia bought Canada's Oz Communications in November 2008 to improve social messaging services, German map technology firm bit-side GmbH in February 2009 and Hamburg-based Cellity in July 2009. Like many of the other deals, Cellity appeared to be a straightforward talent acquisition; Nokia said at the time the deal would "accelerate service development in some areas" and immediately closed the service. A month later it bought Plum, a 'private' social network from the US. And last week Nokia completed its acquisition of Motally, a US mobile metrics tool, saying it would continue to serve Motally's existing customer base.

However on the same day, to Motally users' dismay, it sent them a termination notice for the service.

All these firms, like Dopplr, have joined Nokia's services division. Fred Destin, a prominent venture capitalist, told the Guardian that the Dopplr deal was a straightforward talent acquisition, and that Dopplr was never that powerful. For Nokia and its vast, mainstream consumer base, there was little incentive in maintaining a niche service.

"My sense is that they were going to try and look at Dopplr as a horizontal piece of technology they could use on phones," he said. "Nokia doesn't have a great track record of maintaining innovation internally, and they are in soul-searching mode. It's a classic case of a large company acquiring a small company and not being entirely sure what to do with it."

He added: "There's a bunch of reasons it was a weird acquisition and it's difficult for a small company to flourish inside a company like that."

Comparable services Yapta and TripIt had 104,000 unique users in September 2009, according to comScore. Yapta shrank to 29,000 by July 2010 but TripIt grew to 190,000.

One UK startup told the Guardian how his startup pulled back from a partnership with Nokia. "The experience in the app store and Ovi Maps is just too poor. I don't think there's anything they could have done with Dopplr. They aren't used to a partnership world."

One other entrepreneur said that the deal could be valued in terms of its staff, and cited a common startup valuation formula of $500,000 per high-profile developer. At that rate, Biddulph, Jones and the team should be very pleased with the price put on their head. As for Dopplr – perhaps it was only ever a beautiful experiment, and one that ended in a modest but well-earned exit for its creators.

But Nokia needs something to start going right for it. Though it sells more smartphones than any other company, including Apple and BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM), in 2009 its revenues fell by 20% compared with 2008, from €50bn to €41bn, but its profits crashed from €3.7bn to just €270m – and its first-quarter figures for 2010 were more like 2009 than 2008.

Its efforts to launch the Ovi app store to compete with Apple's iPhone app store and the Android Marketplace run by Google have impressed few so far – and if the lesson of Dopplr is repeated, then it may be shunned by exactly the innovative people it needs to attract.

One source close to Dopplr said he wasn't surprised Dopplr was being allowed to deflate. "Nokia," he said. "Where good ideas go to die ..."

Companies bought by Nokia

A selected list of acquisitions the company has made over the past three years

Dopplr
What is it: travel-focused social network
When bought: September 2009
How much: $20m (est)
What happened next: nothing, apparently. "We have decided to bring it into a maintenance mode… but will not develop it further at this stage," Nokia said in a statement on Friday following the Guardian's story on its disappearance.

Symbian
What is it: mobile operating system company; Nokia already held shares
When bought: June 2008
How much: €264m
What happened next: it made Symbian open source and based its phones on it.

Navteq
What is it: American-based sat-nav data and products
When bought: October 2007
How much: $8.1bn
What happened next: Nokia phones now include free sat-nav.

Novarra
What is it: wireless internet system
When bought: March 2010
How much: n/a
What happened next: nothing visible.

Cellity
What is it: web and mobile address book
When bought: July 2009
How much: n/a
What happened next: nothing visible. The last mention of Cellity on Nokia's site is in 2009.

Plum
What is it: system for saving and sharing files in a social network
When bought: September 2009
How much: n/a
What happened next: visitors to plum.com have fallen to a tenth of those a year ago.

Motally
What is it: mobile analytics
When bought: August 2010
How much: n/a
What happened next: Motally customers were told accounts would be closed.