Taneli Tikka, a Finnish serial entrepreneur and currently the CEO of RunToShop, COO of Dopplr and a former CEO of IRC Gallery among other things, has started blogging (here) about entrepreneurship, startups and everything that comes with it.

Taneli promises to openly blog about many of his past endeavors, which is something not very often seen from people with an experience comparable to Taneli’s. Not only is this fantastic news for Nordic and especially for Finnish entrepreneurship, but it also sets a great example for all the C-level executives to share their knowledge and insights with the less experienced. To quote Taneli:

I plan to follow the kind of guideline I have often followed: speak my mind on a wide range of issues and topics, as opinionated as it may occasionally be. Sounds like a quick way to get into trouble, doesn’t it?

The blog has only a few posts as yet, but there already is valuable advice for all entrepreneurs. Even though this is certainly not the first time someone has published such information it makes all the difference to the entrepreneurs closer to home who don’t necessarily don’t know where or what to look for from all the blogs published globally.

ArcticStartup applauds the courage for openness and will be sure to follow the blog closely.

Serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky of FON talked to me in London about why he’s so excited about Dopplr, the business model (or lack of thereof) and traveling in general. Here’s a recent blog post on Dopplr’s new set of investors from yesterday.

Dopplr, the Helsinki and London based startup, has secured second round financing from a very admirable group of investors including 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.

“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.”

Despite seeing a lot of attention from both the press and investors, there are some questions that people look answers for. One cannot miss the (despite somewhat questionable) data from Compete.com. According to Compete.com, Dopplr reached just over 50k UVs in August. If you’re making money from commissions on hotel bookings and such, you need a lot more traffic to make the business model work and therefore focusing on such a small group of people travelling so much might be difficult. Furthermore, Mike Butcher at Techcrunch UK makes a solid point about the dilution of ownership with so many investors. It could be that once you get enough popular investors on board, the odds of you failing are smaller as these investors are looking forwards to making a return (hence they echo the name as much as possible).

Having these questions answered would be interesting, but nevertheless you have to give it to the Dopplr team for getting financed in such a tight market - we haven’t heard that many similar stories lately.

I attended RunToShop party last week at Shaker, Helsinki along with a lot of Finnish entrepreneurs and it was a blast. It was an opening day of the RunToShop.fi service, which was to act as the first step towards opening the service internationally at RunToShop.com

RunToShop is a social recommendation service for stores that rewards its users for recommendations as well as for the actual purchases. Whether it works or not is anybody’s guess at this point when the full fledged service is not rolled out yet.

The service at .fi address came and went. I did create a profile and browsed around the service to familiarize with it and decided to came back later on. Yet, today I found that the guys had but the site back behind a login and a password, probably to fix some buggy code. I didn’t get a proper look with still so few stores and service providers on the site at the time and am eager to take a another look as it goes live again. Hopefully there will be a lot more to browse through.

What is notable in RunToShop however is the way it was build: The guys behind the concept started building the start-up only in April 2008 and according to RunToShop CEO, Taneli Tikka, the service has already over 150 partners: Mostly in Finland and in the UK.

What is also unusual is the very strong advisory board the start-up has gathered which includes close to 30 experienced entrepreneurs and key figures in the industry. Similarly Taneli Tikka who is driving the start-up as its CEO has a long list of start-ups behind him, including Dopplr and IRC-Gallery to name only a few.

I did a video interview with Taneli, but since I only had my iphone with me Kai from Floobs borrowed me his Nokia N95 to record the interview. Unluckily I didn’t have a chance to pick the video clip from Kai last week, and when I gave Kai a call yesterday I got an SMS back saying he was hiking somewhere in the Norwegian Lapland, so it’ll have to wait a little. We’ll post the interview on the blog as soon as I get my hands on it.

Dopplr, a service that lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues, released a new version codenamed “Copenhagen” some time ago. There has also been other updates we’ve been writing about along the way. With this post I wanted to recap some of the developments and go a bit more into detail on how the new features are working for the users.

Among other improvements I can now publish my Dopplr profile page on the Internet for the public to see and for the search engines to find. This is a needed addition as it was frustrating to ask people to create their own profile if they only wanted to follow my whereabouts (yes, there was the widget, but only with one default disclosure option). Dopplr also plays along with what is a desired and much overdue positive trend among many social networks, namely giving users the ability to control how much information they want to disclose to the public. This is done via modules which the user can which on and off as she wishes.

After a little tinkering I was able to find my public profile, but there’s still no way to do a search of public profiles on Dopplr’s home page. This would be great addition especially since Google’s Search bots hadn’t found my profile yet, making it practically nonexistent.

Another very useful feature that Tripit already has and which Dopplr has now also added, is the possibility to input your trips to the service via email and SMS. Dopplr didn’t stop there but let’s the users also use Twitter to input one’s itinerary. This was a positive surprise. It took me a few back and forth confirmations to make it work, but not too much to make it an inconvenience. After I follow Dopplr on Twitter I am able to input a new trip just by doodling my destination and the dates into Twitter and post the Tweet to add it to my Trips at Dopplr.

A user can also choose to use Twitter to post her itinerary ’silently’ to Dopplr in which case it does not even show in her Tweets. I did this, but due to the usage limits that Twitter has imposed it takes a long while for the posting to go through. Once a trip is confirmed a user can also forward relevant emails such as hotel reservations to the service where they will be automatically attached to her trip.

Email, SMS and Twitter upload is a welcome addition that let’s Dopplr to strike back as Tripit already added what was Dopplr’s killer feature, namely the serendipity feature which allows me to see all my friends who use Dopplr and are in the city at the same time that I’m visiting there.

I found this quote (from Dopplr blog) fascinating on how Dopplr works out the the dates and other info from the doodlings we send them:

There are an awful lot of ways to format a travel itinerary. When people asked us to extract trips from emails, we looked at our long history of e-tickets, confirmations and reservations, and scratched our heads.

Inspiration came in the shape of Apple’s last OS X release, Leopard, and an intriguing feature called “Data detectors“.

We realised that instead of creating a piece of code to decode every email format out there, we could look for patterns of dates and place names in the text (and later, other information too) and turn those into trips.

A happy side-effect of this approach is that as well as extracting information from automatic reservation emails, it works well with short text strings like “I’ll be in San Francisco from 3rd July to 7th July”. This means we can work with many hand-written emails, with Twitters, and with SMSes too.

Of course it won’t work with every variation under the sun (for example, it’s most reliable when an email contains just a return trip in a single hop), but we’ve had very satisfying results in our testing. And of course every email you send us will be added to our test suite so that our engine can get better and better over time.

I’ve always liked Dopplr for its simplicity, but there has still been the feeling that its a one trick pony with its fascinating serendipity function. With the Copenhagen release this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore and I could see myself move all my travel planning to Dopplr, if I only could access my full itinerary from my mobile with the same ease I can Twitter it up there. Something that Tripit makes possible even though not via Twitter but via SMS.

One can speculate if the new version is codenamed Copenhagen because Tyler Brûlé just recently nominated Copenhagen ‘the most livable city in the world’ in the latest issue of what is supposedly every city hopper’s bible, Monocle. Regardless, I think Dopplr has made itself much more useful for all of us with its latest version.