"Except that on the other side of the world, in the 2,000-year-old Bavarian city of Augsburg, a 20-year-old named Valentin Yeo read the article in the online version of the Times and thought, "That's really a good idea." Yeo, an apprentice at an IT consulting firm in Augsburg, recruited seven of his computer-savvy friends and set to work evenings and weekends hammering together an Epinions facsimile. In six weeks they were done, but they didn't have the money to get their site up and running, and didn't know how to get any. So on a Sunday afternoon in early September, Yeo e-mailed a venture capitalist in Munich whom he'd read about in a German magazine, and asked for help. Within hours, the VC was on the phone, asking a shocked Yeo to come in for a meeting. Within days, the VCs had hooked Yeo up with a clean-cut trio of somewhat older and more experienced would-be Internet entrepreneurs from Munich, and lined up $4 million in funding. The newly formed company, Ciao.com, launched its site Nov. 15, only 10 -- count 'em, 10 -- weeks after Epinions's debut."

"The Dooyoo (as in "Do you know about ... ?") guys made the rounds a few weeks later. CEO Felix Frohn-Bernau says he and his five co-founders (a group of Berliners in their 20s and 30s, some with actual business experience) slapped together a business plan in four days and four nights in late September, mailed it out to VCs on a Friday night, took a train from Berlin to Munich on Monday morning, and put in calls to VCs saying they were in town to meet with other VCs. Wellington's Krocke met them and liked them a lot, but he had already committed to Ciao.com. A few blocks away at Earlybird, co-founder Hendrik Brandis (ex-McKinsey) had no such conflict. "They sent over the business plan and we said, 'Yes, we agree,'" says Brandis. Before long, with money from Earlybird, Technologieholding, and, of course, the German government, Dooyoo was on its way."