Title: When Yelp realized that Europeans may want to rate small businesses as well as Americans, they were confronted with Qype, a fairly direct knockoff started in Germany about a year after Yelp was founded. Because their business depends so heavily on how many reviews you already have (http://goo.gl/ykXu), it'll be hard to take them on.<p>So Yelp missed an opportunity somewhere during year one, but hey, it happens. They were busy and you can't do everything at once.<p>What strikes me as stranger is the businesses that have existed for several years, but still don't look across US borders. When I wanted to have some copies of my thesis printed, bound and shipped to Amsterdam, I was surprised that Lulu wasn't set up for it (they shipped from Spain, slowly and expensively) and there was no local equivalent in sight.<p>All right, all right, setting up a supply chain for mailing physical widgets in lots of confusing little European countries is hard. So let's look at a business that deals in purely virtual goods: Wufoo.  I can't find a Wufoo-like thing that'll speak Dutch to me. At all.<p>Now you may object that Wufoo takes payments, and figuring out how people in lots of confusing little European countries like to pay their bills is not easy.<p>Which brings me to the last category: web startups that provide some really cheap service or content and that fund themselves largely by ads, or by the expectation that some large company will buy them out and figure out a revenue model later (if ever).<p>What do people in The Netherlands, to come back to my small but fairly internet-savvy home country, tend to use for small-time blogging? Blogger? Wordpress? Nope. Something called web-log.nl<p>Now don't get me wrong. I respect the entrepreneurs that started web-log.nl . They probably did a fine job, for all I know.<p>But there is an obvious missed opportunity for the US firms, methinks. Or is it just too hard?
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