Marko Ahtisaari and team have created something interesting and relevant given the activities in Washington D.C. earlier today.

Yet another cool example of what you can do with the right technology and maps – Check this out:

Dopplr generated what they call the Personal Annual Reportfor all their users. It’s a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that they’re delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008.

To give you an example, they have published the Personal Annual Report of someone who’s had a very busy 2008 – President Elect Barack Obama.

Download a PDF copy of Barack Obama’s 2008 Dopplr Personal Annual Report from http://dplr.it/obama-report

The main info-visualisation element of the report is the 2008 timeline, where Dopplr represent the trips you’ve taken throughout the year, pulling out the places you’ve stayed the longest and, where Dopplr can illustrate them with the Creative-Commons-licenced, Flickr-sourced photography we use on our new city pages.

Then, in the main body of the report there are a number of other things from your 2008 we try and surface, such as the fellow travellers that you coincide with most on your trips.

There’s the by-now-familiar Dopplr map of your travels which in Obama’s case tells a very interesting tale based on the shape of his campaign. You can see the perhaps-unusual whistlestop trips to Europe, the Middle-East, and Afghanistan – the barely-visible dots of which indicate the brevity of those stops.

Taking a closer look at the USA, the pattern of the campaign becomes more apparent. Larger circles correspond to battleground states during the campaign and other notable events can be seen, such as the visit made due to the sad illness and passing of Obama’s grandmother, registering as a circle over Hawaii.

As a man with strong views on climate-change, the environment and energy, the President-Elect will no doubt be very interested in the carbon estimate of his travels during the campaign as calculated by AMEE.

Dopplr deliberately chose a provocative visualisation here – a scale of the equivalent CO2 yearly output of Hummer SUVs to convey the estimate in concrete terms. Many of us after all would think very hard about driving such a vehicle, perhaps harder than we do about taking a flight.

Blyk will no longer offer members 217 mins and 43 texts.

Instead, the team at Blyk have decided to offer a more comprehensive package of £15 of credit per month which members can use on whatever they wish… almost.

Calls, SMS, MMS and data are included but premium services are not.

OK, this looks pretty cool. I am a big fan of making the service as flexible as possible and have no doubt that members will enjoy accessing their chosen social network(s), email accounts, maps etc. for free BUT if a member just wants to make calls and send texts then they are quite a lot worse off – Ricky Chotai at Mobile Industry Review is sharp with numbers and has run the maths to find out exactly what is being gained/lost, check his smart post out here.

So mins and text are reduced but at least you can go and buy whatever content you want – No.

Blyk launched a major content offering at the start of this year which looks impressive… aesthetically anyway, haven’t had the chance to use it.

It seems like you can use your credit to surf the portal but not to actually purchase content, you’ll have to top up with real money for that.

This is smart for two reasons.

Firstly, because it will encourage members to browse the content portal and inevitably some of them will top up and buy ringtones, games, wallpapers etc. thus creating an additional revenue stream.

Secondly and in my opinion, most importantly – Blyk has created extra inventory to sell to advertisers in the form of interstitials, pre-rolls, banners, branded gaming et al.

Not bad – They have managed to increase advertising revenue potential, decrease cost of maintaining members AND offer members more choice on how they wish to communicate.

Smart move ,but everyone already knows that these guys are no fools – Just check out the management team.

As you can see from a few posts down, I laid into Spotify a little for their poor advertising experience.

I also gave them well earned kudos for the fantastic service they have created.

For me, a sure sign of a start-up that will go places is a personal response to the criticisms, comments and encouragement relating to my last post, written like this:

Hi Al,

Good post. You’ve got some very valid points about the ads and I made sure our ad team sees your post. We’re still in Beta and experimenting with different advertising models including different behavior when the app is maximized but obviously the more relevant we can make the ads the better.

We’re happy to listen to various ideas that people may have to improve the service so I appreciate your feedback.

Andres

Brilliant – I have no doubt that Andres and team will make some adjustments and get the ad experience to the same level that the rest of their service is at.

Thanks to the Spotify team for coming back to me so quickly, I will be sure to keep the updates coming as Spotify evolves.