Battle of the Finnish Travel Startups: Dopplr vs. Vailoma
Two notable startups from Finland are built around travel. Dopplr is a niche social networking service where you post and share your travels, and the newcomer Vailoma is a tool for organizing information about your trips.
Here is a comparison of the two travel-related Finnish startups.
How do they describe themselves?
Dopplr is an online service for frequent business travellers.
Dopplr lets you share your travel plans privately with a group of friends and colleagues whom you have chosen. It then tells you when people you know will be in the same cities. It also reminds you of people who live in the places you’re planning to visit.
Vailoma is a new travel website that will help to make the way you plan your next holiday trip much faster, easier and more fun. …. We offer tools to easily look for travel information, both user generated and gathered from the net, filter out what is not relevant to you, get destination reviews, budget estimates and so on.
So Dopplr is a niche social/business networking service, Vailoma is a travel information organizing tool. Both sites rely heavily on UGC (user generated content).
Business Idea
Dopplr are not disclosing their business model at this time. All they say is that it is not going to be based solely on advertising and marketing models. So they either have a very complex business model involving some type of subscriptions or - even worse - they haven’t figured out how to make money from the service.
Vailoma on the other hand has a clear business model. They will make money by showing you targeted advertisements from our selected partners. We also get a few cents whenever you choose to book a trip through our service. In this model their biggest challenge is to get traffic, a lot of traffic.
Financing
Dopplr has a raised round A funding from Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and Saul Klein (the Accelerator Group). Amounts are not disclosed.
Vailoma just raised seed funding from government-owned Veraventures and Valve Branding, a leading digital design agency in Finland, that will also be working on Vailoma’s service.
Web site
Dopplr’s ambition is to deliver a site that is simple and they have succeeded in that. The site is very user-friendly and good-looking in a uniquely minimal way. It seems that they have managed to build something that will grow and get more functionality the more you use it.
Vailoma’s current offering looks good, too, but unfortunately I was only able to scratch the surface of the site as it is still very much under development.
Facebook apps
Both of the services have also their own facebook apps. Dopplr’s app is very nicely tied to the main service and it adds a Dopplr box your profile telling where you aim to go to next. The great thing about it is that it tells you which of your Facebook friends are also Dopplr users and you can share your trips with them without leaving Facebook.
Vailoma has taken a different approach. They have made an app called Vailoma City Fight which will help to determine the best and worst cities on Earth. In City Fight you which you pick the better city of two choices. Points go to Vailoma for a more creative app, although Dopplr’s app is better tied to the actual service. Dopplr has aimed at creating a better service for their users, Vailoma has opted to create a good app that would eventually lead to traffic to their site. So far Dopplrs app has far more users of the two.
Naming
Dopplr is probably named after the Doppler effect. Vailoma sounds like a place in the South Pacific, but its a combination of two Finnish words: vai is the Finnish word that can be translated perhaps and loma means holiday.
Conclusions
Its hard to tell which of the two travel focused startups will do better. Dopplr at the moments has the the better service, but Vailoma has a better chance to make money.
Dopplr is a fun, useful, very easy to use, but feature-rich niche web2.0 service without a business model. Vailoma seems like a great travel information organizer that needs huge traffic to make their ad-centered business model to succeed.
Both startups have the possibility to build world-class services and so far Dopplr is further on its way. I hope they figure out their business model before their funding runs out.
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Comments
Date: January 20, 2008 | Time: 6:46 pm
Thanks for the great post! We at Vailoma do think that we and Dopplr are not competing at all but instead are complementing services. Dopplr is targeting business travelers and is more about following your business contacts’ travels whereas we focus more on active holiday travelers and aggregating information for them on the hundreds of thousands of travel destinations, sights, etc. We definitely can benefit from each other.
Date: January 21, 2008 | Time: 10:38 am
You definately have different type of services with different target groups, as said. Dopplr is trying to help with business networking and you are helping individual travellers in information needs. I wish you good look in your efforts!
Date: March 3, 2008 | Time: 11:41 pm
[...] A new Finnish startup Scred (short for street credit) is a new community finance tool thet strives to keep friends happy with each other by tracking debts and shared expenses. This is another Finnish online service that has been built from a need of frequent travellers. (Others being Vailoma and Dopplr.) [...]
Date: March 16, 2008 | Time: 12:36 pm
[...] Finnish travel startup Vailoma is now called TripSay. The service itself hasn’t changed much besides new fancier web2.0 graphics, which are probably the outcome of the investment by Valve Branding in January. (Valve is one of the leading digital agencies in Finland who also contributed to the success of Jaiku.) TripSay is still a travel planning tool that helps to organize information related to to trips. The information is both aggregated from around the web and user generated. [...]
Date: August 6, 2008 | Time: 9:57 pm
[...] models of social travel sites in general, which was not a problem back in January when I did in my first post about Tripsay (It was called Vailoma back [...]
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