Online network for frequent business travellers Dopplr has raised new funding from a group of angel investors in a second financing round. The undisclosed round makes the list of Dopplr backers even more impressive than it already was: Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman and Joichi Ito were some of the initial seed investors, while Saul Klein from The Accelerator Group invested in both rounds.
Dopplr helps you make the most of your trips by sharing your travel plans with people and brands you trust.
The service then highlights coincidences, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Tokyo when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your PC or on the go, and links with many popular online calendars and social networks.
Dopplr expects to use this new round of financing to expand its business globally. Currently, Dopplr’s user base is mostly in Europe and the U.S.
TechCrunch broke the news today: Nokia has acquired Berlin-based Plazes for an undisclosed amount. The service – founded by Felix Petersen – allows its users to track the places, activities and people in their lives. Sounds like Twitter and Jaiku right? But it isn’t completely the same, as the location is Plazes core feature. You don’t have to mention you’re in Berlin, it shows up in a Google map. Updates can be send by SMS or a mobile app (soon also on the iPhone).
Felix Petersen
There’s one other important difference though, while Twitter is U.S.-based and Finnish Jaiku was sucked up by Google, Plazes however, will remain European. Their first financial backing came from European private equity firm Doughty Hanson, which invested €2.7 million. The second round of funding DOES have an American touch to it, as Plazes received €1 million in total from Marc Andreessen (US), Esther Dyson (US), and Martin Varsavsky (Argentina). But that’s all there is. Plazes will stay in Berlin and remain member of the European tech family. And that is good for Europe. Just so you know, Loic Le Meur feels the same about it.
So what will happen next? Most likely, Plazes will become a standard Nokia app – installed on all its phones. Here’s what Felix himself (or his ghost blogger) writes:
The team is very excited to be able to further develop the Plazes service that is online today together with Nokia. If all goes well, in the near future plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices.
I hope geo localization is ready for its big break-through.
Wanna know how the Plazes office and Felix’ home looks like? Check the MTV Cribs-like video we shot in January.
Fon, the free hotspot provider that gives away free Wi-Fi routers and wants to build a worldwide, and free, Wi-Fi network has announced closing a new investment round. They raised $9.5 Million from a bunch of investors. The current shareholders (Google, British Telecom, Digital Garage and Martin Varsavsky) invested some but there is also a new investor involved: the US Venture Capital arm of Sistema, Russia´s leading telco. This also means that FON will start expanding into Russia.
Another exciting new plan is the development of a sort of personal proxy server built into a Fon Hotspot. It will up- and download content from the internet for you while you are doing other stuff. It will be called Fonera 2.0 and we can’t wait to get one for free.
And that might take longer than expected because Martin has announced that he is going to be a little more cautious with his money. No more free hardware and slightly higher fees will help Fon decrease their burn-rate from 1.2 million a month to $500.000 a month. There are also plans to upgrade to the updated WI-Fi protocol lovingly called ‘802.11n’.
There is no mention of Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital who invested in earlier rounds. These earlier rounds also brought in a lot more money so it is likely that Fon is less successful than they try to appear. It is very hard to find out how many active Foneros are currently active and estimations range from 125.000 to 1 million+. Fon is not very transparent when it comes to showing the number of routers which are really active. If you have set-up a Fon hotspot in the past you must enter a request to have it removed from their maps. If you don’t they still count you in their media and investor statistics, as a live Fon Hotspot. Of the Fon Hotspots that are actually live only a small percentage will be a an actual hotspot where people accidently stumble upon it.
As a former Wi-Fi Hotspot operator (sold my business in 2003) I’m not very optimistic about Fon’s future. The dream of having free and ubiquitous Wi-Fi everywhere is extremely alluring and it is clear and understandable that Fon has a large community of eager believers.
Fon makes for a great story but is that enough to build a business on.
In september Fon, the free Wi-Fi initiative backed by Google, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures, launched a B2B program in an effort to get more coverage in densely populated areas. It promised 50% of all revenues to FONtrepreneurs willing to buy a marketing starter kit to promote and sell FON. This kit included 3 La Foneras, a Fontenna and flyers which people could use to persuade local cafés and bars to offer free Wi-Fi.
Fon has always been promoted as a community effort with hundreds of thousands of happy and cooperative members. So this should have worked. But the program has been terminated before it was launched. Here is why:
Fon originally invited 860 people from 5 countries: USA, Canada, Belgium, Holland and Germany.
Of those, 39 people replied and showed interest.
Of those, 13 people agreed to go through the legal loop holes that the laywers required.
Of those, 5 used the promo code
Of those, 2 immediately put the La Foneras for sale on eBay
Oops!
It is hard to estimate how successful Fon REALLY is. They have previously claimed 200.000 hotspots worldwide and Fon’s founder has a full-time job talking about the imminent success of Fon at every major conference in the world. But how many of those hotspots are connected, active and available for other people is anyones guess. Judging from Martin Varsavsky’s ever present smile all is fine and dandy in FonLand.
Here is an interview with Joanna Rees, the US representative for Fon including a few critical questions at the end of the interview.
Written on 15th September 2008
10 COMMENTS 
Online network for frequent business travellers Dopplr has raised new funding from a group of angel investors in a second financing round. The undisclosed round makes the list of Dopplr backers even more impressive than it already was: Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman and Joichi Ito were some of the initial seed investors, while Saul Klein from The Accelerator Group invested in both rounds.
Written on 23rd June 2008
Written on 12th April 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
