The Next YouTubes

The site's ability to attract small advertisers is beginning to get the big guys' attention. Neighborhood info has become a major battleground for Google and Yahoo!, which draw like numbers of local searches every month. To capitalize on the primacy of that battle, Jordan Rohan, an Internet analyst with RBC Capital Markets, suggests Yelp sell itself now.

Yelp's founders aren't in a hurry. To build team spirit, they spent last Thursday with the staff--playing croquet, followed by a cable-car ride and a nocturnal pub crawl--happy to bide their time.

TAKE ON THE TITANS

Remember the last company to take on Google? It was a little video start-up called YouTube, which out-cooled Google Video, grabbing 46% of the online video market to Google's paltry 10%. That victory catapulted founders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen from chips to caviar in just over a year.

If 30Boxes.com a Web calendar site, can similarly beat out Google's calendar, a jackpot may await. Unlike Zillow, with its 125 employees, 30 Boxes is run by exactly three people. That's it. No support staff, no assistants, no offices. And no venture capital or outside investors.

Co-founder Julie Davidson says that unlike other calendar services, 30 Boxes is focused on younger users. "They have a Facebook account, a MySpace account, a Flickr account," she says, "and they want to incorporate their social media within a calendar." Davidson sees Facebook as her site's primary competitor because they are both after the same youthful audience.

Building a user base and ad revenues from calendars may prove difficult, since Microsoft, Yahoo!, Apple and various other start-ups have free calendar offerings that are improving. But 30 Boxes' founders know a lot about working from scratch. They created and sold photo destination Webshots twice--first to Excite@home (another dotcom casualty) for $82.5 million in stock in 1999 and then, after buying it back in 2002 for $2.4 million, they retooled it and resold it to CNET for $70 million in 2004. Will they try for the hat trick? "We could go into a larger organization and bring some really fresh ideas," says Davidson. "I'm not anti-acquisition."