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eHub Interviews Yellowikis

Thanks to Paul Youlten, creator of Yellowikis for this email interview posted November 15, 2005.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

Yellowikis: Imagine the 10 month old love-child of Yellow Pages and Wikipedia.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

Yellowikis: Last December my daughter, Rosa, added an article about a small company to Wikipedia in Spain and less than a week later it had been removed. She asked me why it had been deleted and I said: “Well, Wikipedia isn’t Yellow Pages”. After that everything seemed easy.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

Yellowikis: I have a day job. I spend about one hour a day on Yellowikis - more at the weekends. It’s been quite addictive getting it set up. Just recently it has started to have a life of it’s own - sometimes we have hundreds of edits a day, sometimes just a few - it is very dependent on blog and press coverage.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

Yellowikis: Yellowikis was founded by me, Paul Youlten, and my daughter Rosa Blaus. I used to work at Reuters Business Information (now called Factiva) so I know a bit about business information. Rosa is at High School in Spain. There are 4 admins and about 30 regular editors. More join every few days.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

Yellowikis: We use the same MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia. So our system design and user interface is pretty much fixed. Philosophically we see Wikipedia as the best design too.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

Yellowikis: The WikiMedia engine uses LAMP (Linux, Apache,MySQL and PHP). We have some extra stuff in the pipeline that uses more JavaScript. It’s all open source. Even our logo was designed with InkScape. Both Ward Cunningham (the inventor of Wikis) and Mitch Kapor (Founder of the Open Source Application Foundation) have Yellowikis t-shirts. We like to walk the talk.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

Yellowikis: We really need a WYSIWYG user interface for doing edits. I think Wikipedia can get away with having a slightly geeky mark-up language. But Yellowikis needs to be much more open, popular and easy to use - Maybe Writely or Wikiwig will come to our rescue.  We also want to make adding geo and industry codes easier.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

Yellowikis: Right from the start we recognised that Yellowikis has the potential to make a much bigger impact on developing countries than in industrialised economies. Our main page has been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. Urdu and Punjabi should follow soon. Chinese and Hindi are going to raise us to the next level. The database includes companies from Ethiopia, Rwanda, Vietnam, India… as well as a hairdresser in San Francisco, a gay club in Warsaw and a list of Presbyterian Churches the USA. We are really very international and open.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?

Yellowikis: More languages, an interface to Google Maps, a better industry coding system, lots of PR, thousands of companies.

eHub: The next 2 years?

Yellowikis: Millions of companies, hundreds of languages, thousands of industry sectors, brand and product identifiers. Unfortunately I doubt if poverty will be history in by then, but we hope that international trade will be a bit fairer.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Yellowikis: We have quite a professional looking logo and many people assume we are a get-rich-quick dot.com. I got an email from a management consultant that said: “Unless you are in government development, why provide business information for free?” Clearly some people still don’t get that the rules have changed. It’s quite easy for two people with $75 dollars and a few hours hard work to challenge a $28bn industry (Yellow Pages) without any ambition to make a fast buck.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

Yellowikis: Press coverage, particularly in developing economies.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

Yellowikis: We’re not a business so we don’t need a business model - as we get bigger we will need money to cover hosting and bandwidth. I’m confident that it won’t be a problem.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

Yellowikis: We don’t take advertising so I didn’t pay for the stats package provided by our hosting company. We monitor the number of new companies added to the system. This is very erratic and can vary between zero and 500. A lot of traffic goes direct from Google search results to company pages. I know that IKEA Athens is one of the most popular pages because every few days we get emailed requests for Greek IKEA catalogues.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

Yellowikis: The day Uncle G’s bot started to transwiki companies automatically from Wikipedia’s “Articles for Deletion” to Yellowikis. That was a moment of joy.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

Yellowikis: I’d say: It wasn’t just the death of distance - but the victory of ambition, creativity and imagination over capital.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

Yellowikis: When I feel tired because progress is slow I go to the Ethiopian Yellow Pages (www.ethioyellowpages.com) It has less than 100 companies listed for a country of 73 million people, in the same land area as Spain and France combined . Each of these companies in the Ethiopian Yellow Pages has a graphic rather than a text listing so it can’t be properly indexed by Google. This is where Yellowikis will make an important difference.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

Yellowikis: I usually sleep very well. A couple of weeks ago I had a sleepless night after I got an email from a venture capitalist on saying he was interested in investing in Yellowikis. I felt like Faust and that my daughter would hate me for being a sell-out. Luckily I asked Mitch Kapor (the founder of the OSAF) for his advice and he told me he thought it was a scam.

Thanks to Paul Youlten, creator of Yellowikis for this email interview posted November 15, 2005.

Also see Yellowikis - A Case Study of a Web 2.0 Business, Part 1 by Richard MacManus at ZDNet for more with Paul Youlten.

Visit Yellowikis
Originally added to eHub on Oct 09, 05

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan