Story of Yellowikis!

"We didn’t really set out to be disruptive - but we seem to be causing some sleepless nights among the $22bn Yellow Pages industry, their management consultants asked us ‘Who is funding you?’ and ‘Why are you giving away valuable business information for nothing?’ They don’t understand that it has cost under $500 to set the whole thing up. And $350 of that was on t-shirts."

 -Paul Youlten, founder, Yellowikis

It all started when Paul’s 14 year old daughter, Rosa, added an article to Wikipedia about a small company she had done research on for a homework assignment. It subsequently got deleted by the Wikipedia editors because it was "non-encyclopaedic". Wanting to find a place that would accept such information, Paul and his daughter then spent couple of hours on Google for a Yellow Pages "done the wiki way", but they couldn’t find one. So, as Paul decided to set one up.

Paul Youlten used to work in business development at Reuters Business Information (now Factiva), so he was familiar with "the business of business information". He says the information in the Yellow Pages is often poor and he saw an opportunity for wikis to improve the situation, using their collaborative and open nature.

"Setting up Yellowikis just seemed an interesting challenge so I spent a couple of weekends struggling with Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP and actually managed to get the MediaWiki software up and running. Rosa designed a logo and we were off." - Paul

Yellowikis is still a young site, but Paul was encouraged when a couple of months ago someone he didn’t know developed a Wikipedia bot that automatically transfers (or "transwikis") companies that are listed for deletion on the English.

Wikipedia to Yellowikis. So that solved the problem his daughter had initially, when her Wikipedia article about a small company got rejected. There’s a cliché in Web development that the best businesses come from ’scratching an itch’ - in other words, building something to solve a problem you’ve experienced yourself. That’s certainly been the case with Yellowikis!

At about the time the transwikis bot was developed, Paul noticed that his Yellowikis project was attracting the attention of management consultants from the Yellow Pages industry.  They all asked same questions: “who is funding Yellowikis?” And how Yellowikis plans to generate revenues?

Paul was taken aback by these comments, because Yellowikis (like a lot of Web 2.0 businesses) was developed very cheaply, uses open source technology and relies on word-of-mouth for marketing. This means Yellowikis "can do things that traditional Yellow Pages publishers can’t do" - for example adding a new language, Geo-codes, more categories.

So the low cost of running the business, together with ability to develop and release upgrades rapidly, means Yellowikis has some distinct advantages over its traditional Yellow Pages competitors. An advantage which has been rendered by Web 2.0.