Congratulations to the team at Dopplr, the service that lets you share your travel plans with your friends, for raising a new round of financing from a group of well known angel investors and individuals (I’m an early investor in the company). The new investors include Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé, Thomas Glocer, Yat Siu, Aditya dev Sood, Lars Hinrichs, Joshua Schachter, Brian Behlendorf, Ami Hasan, Daniel Sachs, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Kim Weckström, and Azeem Azhar.

This is not an easy time to raise financing given the terrible shape of the financial markets, the weak economy, the present IPO drought and reduced M&A activity. Even considering current investments have at least a 5 year horizon these factors do have an influence on present investment decisions in venture capital, so I’m very glad Dopplr managed to put together a great group of investors to finance its international expansion.

Last night I attended the “Where Next?” party organized by Dopplr and there I spoke about “Smarter travel” together with Tyler Brule of Monocle, the magazine for global travellers covering international affairs, business, culture and design, a great partner for Dopplr.

Here is a video of me talking about Dopplr with Ville Vesterinen of ArticStartup.

This is the press release for Dopplr’s new round:

Dopplr Announces Financing Round for Global Expansion
International group led by Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé and Thomas Glocer invests in online service for sharing travel intentions

London and Helsinki, 16 September 2008 – Dopplr, the online service for smarter travel, has announced a second financing round from a group of prominent international investors — all users of the service. The funding will be used to expand the service globally from its strong base in Europe.

The new investors include Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé, Thomas Glocer, Yat Siu, Aditya dev Sood, Lars Hinrichs, Joshua Schachter, Brian Behlendorf, Ami Hasan, Daniel Sachs, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Kim Weckström, and Azeem Azhar. Saul Klein, who invested in this round, also invested in the previous round together with Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman and Joichi Ito.

Lead investor Esther Dyson, a frequent traveller across four continents, recently discussed Dopplr and new Web business models in The Wall Street Journal:  “I’m an individual with specific travel plans, which I intentionally make visible to my preferred vendors. […] Value is being created in users’ own walled gardens, which they will cultivate for themselves in real estate owned by the social networks. The new value creators are companies – like Facebook and Dopplr—that know how to build and support online communities.”

Intention sharing and brands

“Dopplr is leading the way in intention sharing services online. It is valuable to know where your trusted friends and colleagues will be, and where you could meet them next,” said Lisa Sounio, CEO of Dopplr. “Partner brands on Dopplr will also give you relevant information and offers tailored to you. For example, when you tell Dopplr your plans to go to Hong Kong, you might get the latest intelligence from Monocle and offers from boutique hotels picked by Mr and Mrs Smith.”

Dopplr users, the world’s most frequent travellers from over 190 countries, made on average more than 10 trips in the last year. This fall they will visit 5431 cities with the top destinations being London, New York, San Francisco, Paris and Berlin. Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai and Dubai are all in the top 50 Dopplr destination cities. When travellers tell Dopplr about their travel plans, two-thirds of them have not yet booked a hotel and half have not yet made any travel arrangements. (Source: Dopplr Fall Travel Outlook 2008)

“We see the opportunity to go well beyond building a simple web-based community with Dopplr,” says Monocle Editor-In-Chief and Dopplr Investor Tyler Brûlé. “There’s considerable scope to use Dopplr to improve the travel experience for all by engaging in discussions with not only our members but also travel brands and government agencies seeking informed opinions.”

Now to end the post here are the things that I would like Dopplr to be able to do in the future. I want Dopplr to tell me which restaurants, hotels and airlines my friends are flying. I want to hit the name of a city and get a list of the hotels and restaurants that my friends recommend. I want it to become an instant recommendation engine from my most trusted sources, my friends. As a business however I think Dopplr has to evolve to be the travel agency of the digeratti.

In September of 2001 Islamic terrorists murdered 3000 innocent people and caused enormous damage to Wall Street, the heart of the American economy. Seven years later we are seeing great economic damage taking place again. It also happens in the area of the Wall Trade Center. But this time it is not foreign terrorists but the combination of irresponsible US banks and poor US government regulatory oversight who are responsible for tremendous economic losses. And while Americans are still the most creative and hard working people on earth and the US economy is still the biggest in the world, this year the US has gone from being the world´s growth locomotive to slamming the brakes on world´s growth. This is not the emerging markets crisis, this is not the Asian flu, this is not Russia´s default. This is the first time America is sinking the world.

A blog is not a place for extensive analysis. Attention spans on the internet are very short and I am the CEO of a company so I have to be brief. What I am going to do is to outline what could be a more in depth article about the main reasons for the decline of the US as a global power. I will also explain as to why after being away from the dollar during the Bush era and moving back to the dollar this summer I may go back to the euro again. I love America and as an investor I want to trust it. But after another crazy weekend in which two of the largest investment banks in America, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, disappeared I am beginning to wonder.

What is wrong with America:

The 2 wars in Irak and Afghanistan have cost over a trillion dollars and appear to have no clear exit strategy. Moreover with McCain continously talking about expanding military spending and American voters not yet satisfied in spending already half of what the world spends in the military it is not clear that America will not make the same mistake as the Soviet empire and spend its way into bankruptcy. Obama by the way is not much better because even though his instincts tell him that America´s military is embarked in useless expensive missions unfortunately American voters do not understand that the solution is not to win every conflict but to pick conflicts that you can win or else not get involved. Afghanistan was reasonable. Irak was not. Saddam Hussein was not more dangerous to USA than Iran now. A trillion was spent and USA is not in a better position than it was in 2000.

Americans keeps accumulating budget deficits at federal, state and city levels and trade deficits in spite of the dollar being extremely weak. Americans spend more than what they make and survive thanks to the savings of the Asians and now the Arab countries. America owes to China more money than the GDP of Alaska. America may have won the cold war but China and Russia now own a lot of the US economy as huge creditors.

American overspending is not only seen in the perennial budget and trade deficits but in the last years it reached historical heights with the absurd secondary mortgage market that is bringing the US banking system to its knees. Bear Stearns is gone, Lehman is bankrupt, AIG is shaking, Citigroup is 75% down, Merrill was just rescued by Bank of America and is also 50% down from its peak. USA is paying dearly for the combination of the desire of US elected politicians to please voters and overspend and the desire of the average American to live beyond his/her means and take unpayable mortgages and overspend.

The desire of Americans to have tailor made justice and tailor made medicine has made American businesses weak. American legal and medical costs are so much higher than those of other economies that the tremendous advantage that US businesses have in terms of the drive and creativity of its people is lost in legal uncertainties, lack of standards, and a medical system that is both unfair and tremendously expensive. Moreover the results are appalling: USA is a less just society than Europe or Japan and a less healthy nation. US longevity is trailing way behind that of the EU and Japan.

America has the best universities in the world and that is true. But Alexa Varsavsky, the eldest of my four kids, just entered Columbia University and the whole incoming class was 1200 students. Of course I am a proud father knowing that out of 1000 kids who may want to get into Columbia University, 200 who can get in dare to apply and then only 16 get in. But what happens to the other 984 kids? When is America going to realize that it can´t have an education system geared to excel at the extremes and not to raise the mean. Because while USA has the most Nobel prizes it scores very poorly in standardized tests. In general USA is a nation focused on Oscars, Olympic Medals, Nobel Prizes, Pulitzers, which is fine. But if there are 4 million high school graduates in the country and the top 50 schools only take 1000 incoming students each what happens to the other 3.95 million students?

On top of this America´s environmental policies are horrendous and America´s energy efficiency as measured by energy use per unit of output are pathetic. I read somewhere that if Americans drove the same cars that we drive over here in Europe America´s oil deficit would be practically wiped out. And we do have a lot of SUV´s in Europe as well. So why is offshore drilling such a big part of the Republican platform? How many hits does Texas have to take until Americans change their habits and begin behaving responsibly? In one of those weird twists of environmental justice hurricanes don´t happen in Europe but global warming is a certainty now and the quickest way to slow it down is energy conservation.

So this is what is wrong with America. But as Bill Clinton said, there´s nothing that is wrong with America that can´t be fixed by what is right in America. And I hope that Americans once more show that they can turn this enormous mess around. They have a lot of work to do: they have to change their energy consumption habits, their spending habits, accept that an open ended ability to litigate can be harmful to the economy, accept that a little less quality in medical care for some can result in better health care for all, they have to make it harder to sue medical professionals, they have to spend less in the military and more in foreign aid, they have to act less alone and build lasting friendships around the world, they have to accept that sometimes it is government and not banks or corporations that have to set policy, they have to restrict lobbying, they have to focus less on the exceptional people and more on the average person who has not seen his/her income rise in 30 years. In short, there´s a lot of work to do in the States and with all my love for the country that I called home for 18 years I sincerely hope it reforms. As opposed to what most people now think around the world I think that overall America has been a force of mostly good in the world during the last century and I hope that it can overcome its failed policies and continue in that role for the next century.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife Going to the States is great for many reasons. One of them is to test whatever is new in the States vis a vis telecomunications and the internet. While there are tons of innovation on the internet, USA is pretty backwards when it gets to telecoms. But there is a shining star and that is T Mobile, a German operator who seems to be very progressive only oustide of their own country. Among the T Mobile novelties is their UMA implementation. UMA is a standard that allows you to seamlessly transfer calls between WiFi and GSM. And as you can see here there are now many UMA handsets. UMA is great in the States because mobile coverage is so poor. With an @home router from T Mobile you achieve the same as with a Femtocell, you at least have coverage at home. On top of that you get all the calling you can eat fixed and mobile for $10 per month out of the same WiFi router. Pretty good. But UMA is not only developing in the States. Orange has a million UMA subs and here´s a great presentation in French about their service (don´t be intimidated, the graphics are great). Other operators with UMA-based offers are TeliaSonera in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, NetCom in Norway, ONO in Spain, Fido and Rogers in Canada.

But neither T Mobile nor France Telecom have copied the Fon model. If the T Mobile or Orange WiFi routers  came with 2 SSIDs or were Foneras which already come with 2SSIDs and global roaming, their services would make much more sense and sell better. Then you could go around with your phone and connect to any Orange router or any T Mobile router and not just yours. We will at Fon try to contact T Mobile and France Telecom to try to team up as successfully as we did with BT in BTFon as well as other operators. But as laptops shrink and handsets grow and both converge into little data hog devices like the iPhones WiFi becomes the least expensive solution to the problem of how to satisfy consumers who want movies and music but don´t want to pay more than 30 dollars/20 euros per month for mobile data.

As things stand I see Fon as a great potential partner for an MVNO who is paying a Vodafone say a fortune for their minutes and making tiny margins, because with Fon this MVNO can make higher margins when the calls go over WiFi. The margins at T Mobile btw are great because when you use your own WiFi you are paying them the same rate as when you use their expensive network.

Fon is also a great potential partner for a 3G operator who finds itself more and more selling handsets that stream movies, games, tv, music, and are very demanding on their networks. Indeed the iPhone does not let you buy from iTunes over 3G but only for WiFi. I find this remarkable since when you buy from iTunes you are paying! It says a lot about the cost of downloading heavy files like TV series over 3G networks. Again UMA is important here as well.

In this video I argue what you would probably not expect from me the Internet entrepreneur and founder of Educ.ar and that is that television, and I don´t just mean science documentaries but all television series including Sex and the City, Gossip Girl, 24, House, Friends and others, can be a great complement to a child´s education. In other words, I don´t think text books, other books, teacher presence, and the internet are enough for a well rounded education. This is especially true if you are trying to give your children an education in which English plays a very important role but you live, as we do, in a non English speaking country. Spain in this case.