Recently, I went to South India to learn about scaling health care services across large, low-income populations. While the businesses are "offline," there is at least one significant similarity to many web-based businesses: leveraging social networks in order to acquire trust, gain customers and generate revenue. Here are just some of the ventures we visited:

• Scojo: low-cost reading glasses. The company has an innovative microfranchise model for training entrepreneurs (low-income individuals, generally women) how to identify problems with vision in order identify prospective buyers and sell the eye glasses. Interesting learnings were: How do find your entrepreneurs and educate them? How do you get low-income entrepreneurs to be willing to pay the upfront costs of the glasses and training? How will buyers overcome the negative stigma associated with glasses? One really interesting take away was the importance of style despite the consumer they were targeting.

• Medicine Shoppe: traditionally served the high-income population, but is expanding its pharmacies/clinics to low income communities in India. This has required completely rethinking how they approach medical services. For example, after finding no business was coming in they removed all the windows and doors from the pharmacies/clinics in the low income areas - with them there, it looked too strange to the local residents and they would not enter.

• 1298: Dial 1298 Ambulance is a private ambulance company. Their business model is especially interesting. It's services are provided at a premium to affluent populations and at no cost to the poor. Scaling up operations in India is challenging - the wealthy and poor live in different areas, separated by traffic and bad roads.

One core focus for many of the organizations was on leveraging already established channels of distribution in order to tap remote / distributed populations. Unlike most developed areas, technology is not always an option for acquiring customers. 

If you're interested in more details, here is a write-up on our trip Southern India.

I'm totally late to the crowd here but a friends startup, smava, recently launched and I'm totally psyched! I met Alexander way back in 2005 when we were both in p2p lending and borrowing space and flew out to Germany in early 2006 to do some work him and the team. They've been slaving away for some time now jumping through all the regulatory hurdles and finally made it through!! Congrats guys! The smava team is just about the sharpest group of guys i have ever met -- i look forward to seeing some exciting things from them!

I've been really curious about how companies can leverage data to drive traffic. While APIs are a great tool for developers, the average consumer could never use them.

Naturally, when Yahoo! Pipes launched I was thrilled. It brings APIs a little closer to the consumer side.

While they still have a world of ways to go, if you're curious to see how the consumer tools side is evolving, I suggest checking out John Musser's presentation from the Web 2.0 Expo -- one of my favorites!

The t-shirt for the Web 2.0 Expo has a blank box where you can write your definition of what "web 2.0 is." Although I have a strong bias toward disintermediation, at Trulia's offsite this year we were doing some brainstorms and it became very clear that the things I do online are not about people in general, it's all about me - what is relevant to my needs, not the needs of the general population. So, in my blank box I wrote Web 2.0 is "me-centric."

I suppose I'm old fashion in thinking that when a company launches they would at least do it with some class. Legalforce ip, which lets people trade patents online, did a press release on VentureBeat when they went live with a site that is, literally, a copy and paste of prosper.com's design. 

LegalForce
Prosper.com

Last Tuesday night our office got cubed out. It was curious watching the installation process - in the span of a few minutes the office space turned from a startup to a corporate-like look and feel. As the cubicles went up I could not help but wonder how it would impact team culture, but in many ways it was equally as exciting to see it happen. The company is moving into yet another stage in its life and it's so great to be part of the process and the team.

While it's too early to tell how relationships around the office might change, so far so good - we've compensated for isolation by hollering over walls and bobbing up and down in our seats to get a peak at people as we chat away.

There is a lot of talk these days about "community". My dislike of the term may come from being a sociology major where things like "network theory," "social reinforcement" models, and "group dynamics" were analyzed to understand the behavior of individuals, individuals in groups, and the collective as a whole. More likely it comes from what Babson calls the "Buzzword Blending Syndrome" - people addicted to incorrectly using business jargon.

In the span of a year discussions have changed from a pre-web 2.0 use of sociological applications to improve operating metrics, resolve holes in a business model, etc. to a web 2.0 "Community" centric conversation. While is remains unclear what people actually mean when referencing "community" (my best guess: people interacting through conversation), the difference in conversation style is key. In the former, one starts with a problem and builds a solution to solve it. In the latter, we start with a solution ("Community") and try to find a problem it can solve. (Lets hope it's solving a problem anyway.)

When I started my first business I was told one thing consistently: starting with a product and finding a market for it is not the ideal path. Yes, some succeed this way but they are harder to find. Start with the problem and build the solution from there. This solution may or may not involve "Community".

The more companies out there creating "community," the harder it is for each additional "community" to be successful. People only have so much time in a day to be active contributors and the percent of the user base that actively contributes is small - possibly growing but small nonetheless.

Whether you're starting from the bottom up (problem to solution) or from the top down (solution to problem), if you don't tap into the basic sociological principles that motivate/drive/control individual behavior in and out of groups, it will be a challenge keeping your "community" alive as opportunities for consumer engagement continue to rise.