Web Start-Up for Sale on EBay

The co-founder of Kiko, an online calendar, is selling his website on EBay four months after Google Inc. introduced a competing product.

Bids start at $50,000 for the Kiko.com Internet address and computer code. The auction closes Saturday, co-founder Justin Kan said.

“Someone else made a product that was more successful at attracting users,” Kan said. “I don’t feel like we got an unfair deal or anything like that. We tried our best.”

The sale highlights the effect that Google, the most-used Internet search engine, can have on companies when it moves into their markets.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google introduced its online calendar in April, almost a year after Kiko’s debut August 2005.

On the Web, bloggers were speculating about whether Google Calendar killed Kiko and whether the sale signals an end to a boom in Internet start-ups.

Kan, 23, started Kiko with a friend, Emmett Shear, as an undergraduate at Yale University. The site never generated any revenue. Kan had planned to make money by selling space on the site to advertisers.