Article 1

ow this definitely falls in the category of a purple cow.

Focus - Superbly focused on niche NRI population who want to get things done quickly and don't mind paying a fee for the same

Stands out from the rest of the crowd like banks who offer financial services etc.

Market Size - 25 million Population , obviously not all NRIs would use it. But even if 10% have some sort of work that needs to be done in India, be it filing tax returns, arrange for travel for parents, etc....that's a cool 2.5 million target base

There is a certainly story building element built in to the service where it is easier for the sneezers to spread the word around

Management team - TTK. suffice to say

Rev Model - Very clear, from day one, from customer one...No issues on that

Future competitors - This kind of service more than anything needs to be create buzz among NRIs.I am sure there would be a thousands of sites who might be doing a part of what this service does, But can it back it up and ward off competitors with a brand name which instantly creates a ring in customer's mind

Get Friday Service - 295 usd per month - Virtual assistant, another innovative element of the service which takes care of personal to do items of a customer

While writing this post, I stumbled on to ananalystsite. Competition in KPO sector is hotting up. Its just a matter of time, every kind of financial modeling and statistical modeling skills would be available among a large section of indian population. Anyway I am digressing from the original intent of the post.If Virtual assistant is the extent to which things can be outsourced, is India becoming an army of service workers? Can the youngsters come out of this service mould and actually develop innovative products ? !!

Article 2

Steven Ayers is founder and President of investment management company Steven Ayers & Company. His Austin-based company invests in the local stocks of over 40 markets. Predictably, life is hectic for the 39-year-old CFA, which is probably why his remote assistant Smriti Roy from Brickwork India, based in Bangalore, clocks in around 40 hours per week. Apart from collating information on various markets, investment research, helping out with the investor reports and stock-specific data, his MBA-grad assistant also mails him daily performance of all the stocks in his portfolio before he wakes up at 4 a.m. local time. She costs me a quarter of what an actual MBA would and I can call her up anytime in day or night and she doesnt have a problem, he says.

Patricia Kriz is 27, single and works for a real estate investment fund in New York City. A self-confessed big foodie, Kriz is also in the process of setting up her own company Pattys Pantry NYC, selling premium desserts and baked products to stores in NYC and on the internet. In August last, she came across a websiteAsk Sunday, offering concierge services. On impulse, she sent in a request for a rental car on a busy weekend and was pleasantly surprised at the service. Not only did they find her a car within the specified time, it was also $25 (Rs 1,000) cheaper than what she could have found herself. Kriz now gets the Hyderabad-based Ask Sunday agents to gather market data, do research and documentation work for her. Among the host of requests she sends to Ask Sunday are restaurant reservations, flight tickets, appointments, ordering flowers, wake- up calls, and finding out hotel rates. In one instance, she even found the right jeweller to fix a sentimental piece for her. I now regularly make a list of things that I get done by Sunday, she says.

If that sounds like a dream, it probably is. For Ayers, Kriz and thousands like them, outsourcing their workboth personal and professional to remote assistants based out of India is the norm.

Knowledgeable, cost-effective and more motivated than the local staff, these assistants are important pointspersons in making life easier for their clients.

Men Friday online

Suvidh Marwaha, CEO, Tasks EveryDay

According to Wikipedia, a concierge (kN-syrzh) is an employee who lives on the premises of apartment buildings and serves as a general property caretaker. A clutch of Indian companies, however, is now giving a new meaning to the word.

Anything that can be handled remotely via internet, e-mail, fax, VoIP (voice over internet protocol) phones is a do-able task. Ask Sunday, co-founded by Steve Ludmer and Avinash G. Samudrala in mid-2007, is a new player in the field but is already servicing nearly 2,000 customers in countries like the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Dubai.

Youve got mor@l support

Srinivasan

Some would scoff at the very suggestion but you can get emotional and moral support with the help of concierges. YourManInIndia (YMII) provides moral support services to Chennai-based Sughandha Srinivasan, 74, mother of its NRI client. Life was slightly difficult for the lady till YMIIs Charu entered her lifeonce a week for the last three years. Under YMIIs moral support service, Charus job not only requires her to spend a couple of hours with Srinivasan and check on her well-being but also do small errands for her, like bill payment, ticket booking or doctors appointments. I can call Charu anytime of the day, for any information. She worries about me as much as my children do, Srinivasan says. Charu is not the only visitor. J.V. Raman, a doctor with a reputed hospital in Chennai, also comes regularly for general check-up, under YMIIs healthcare programme.

The company is headquartered in New York City (NYC) and its major workforce (around 200) is based out of Hyderabad. Both of us were busy professionals, working long hours in NYC and were looking for ways to get some of our time back.

We saw there were so many people who were time-starved and stretched between work and family, but a dedicated personal assistant was just not cost-effective, says Samudrala. So, they created a pooled system of assistants that could not only help them but also other busy professionals they knew.

Mumbaibased Tasks EveryDay, part of Alfa Overseas Group, has a workforce of 250 people looking after more than 1,000 clients from the US, UK and Australia. The companys 25-year-old CEO Suvidh Marwaha says: We are adding 10-15 new clients daily and we hope to grow to about 5,000-strong staff in the next five years.

Their client Johnny Johnson is 28, single and works in a small office furniture suppliers company Premier Suppliers, based out of Washington D.C. Johnson had to cope with a lot of important and not so important work which made his work hours stretch to stressful levels.

But not anymore. For the last three-to-four months, hes been outsourcing his daily chores like creating new invoices, researching new vendors, manufacturers, fixing his appointments, to Tasks EveryDay.

Its a revelation to me that I can actually get my assistant to do so many things; that too in a monthly budget of $1,100-$1,200 (Rs 44,000-48,000), he says. Brickworks moment of reckoning came in 2005 when theNew York Timescolumnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote about his friend Vivek Kulkarni (Brickworks COO and ex-IT secretary of Karnataka) and his company inThe World is Flat. Brickwork was stormed with requests for remote executive assistants from all parts of the world.

Ask Sundays Ludmer and Samudrala

Brickwork now gets around 50-60 leads (service requests) each day and selectively signs on a little more than a quarter of these as clients. Get Friday, a virtual assistant service of TTK Services in Bangalore, has a staff of 175 serving about 1,000 clients from the US, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, among others. Get Friday charges $15 (Rs 600) an hour, plus $10 (Rs 400) a month, though rates are lower for those with monthly plans.

It is quite incredible to note that 90 per cent of tasks may not actually require physical presence there, says P. Sunder, Chief Operating Officer, Get Friday. TTKs dedicated service for NRIs YourManInIndia (YMII) makes the lives of 20,000 Indian expatriates easy and gets things done for them in India. Clients can choose to place an order through the website and then the requirement flows to one of the six branches in India.

At your service

The services being offered by these concierges, or virtual valets, range from regular to bizarre. There are requests for quick information look up, getting music organised, online shopping, wake-up calls with the weather update and a reminder to exercise thrown in, to even getting work done on the companys quarterly report, market research, documentation, compilation of information and in some cases even getting jobs for their clients. We have organised parties and delivered food locally in the US through phone, we got a window pane fixed in Geneva and we can get a contractor to fix a broken plumbing line sitting right here in Bangalore, elaborates Sunder.

P. Sunder, COO, Get Friday

Get Fridays client Valentin Yeo, 28, a self-employed SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) consultant in Munich, often needs support for his consulting business, updating and sorting his MP3 collection and sorting images. Though he says it is very uncommon in Germany to do something like this, it makes sense to him. A lot of work would not get done if it wasnt for Jasmine, my assistant at Get Friday. I guess I would say in a good week I get around 10-15 hours freed because of Jasmine, he says.

Ask Sunday, which calls its clients Sunday members, partners with various travel agencies in the US to offer full service travel agency support. Tasks EveryDay gets requests to search match portals to find suitable matrimonial matches. YMII, for its part, once got a vintage birth certificate (for a person born before 1930) from Shimla at the request of an Englishman in Canada.

The India advantage

Evalueserve, a research firm, has predicted that person-to-person offshoring, both consumer services and services for small businesses, would grow rapidly, to more than $2 billion (Rs 8,000 crore) by 2015 globally. Its a winwin for all. While the service cost differs from company to company, hourly rates can vary between $7 (Rs 280) and $50 (Rs 2,000), depending on the task, time and expertise. For the clients, thats an obvious advantage of offshoring to India.

For the service providers, it has translated into a big opportunity. There are a host of companies like Virtualassistant247 and Yantram that offer offshore personal assistant services to individuals as well as small set-ups in the US and UK.

Vivek Kulkarni, COO, Brickwork

Websites such as Guru.com, Elance.com, RentACoder.com and GetAFreelancer.com act as trading platforms for such services and over 10 lakh professionalsa majority of whom are from Indiaare already registered on these sites as PPO providers.

Thats not all. Companies abroad have incorporated these services as part of the employee benefit plans and many are encouraging their employees to use such services to improve their time management.

Time perhaps for the Indian companies to take a cue from their foreign counterparts to embellish their benefits packages with concierge services

Article 3

BANGALORE: Life outsourcing or delegating your everyday chores is perhaps the latest to join the back office. So, from reading bed-time stories to fixing weddings and window panes and shipping your favourite biscuits, outsourcing of personal needs is seen as the next wave.

In its report, Evalueserve, a research firm, predicts that person-to-person offshoring, both consumer services and services for small businesses, would grow rapidly to over $2 billion by 2015. And, Bangalore-based TTK Services, which offers online services of this nature through Getfriday.com and Yourmaninindia.com, is betting big on this space.

"The third wave of outsourcing is generally referred to as person-to-person outsourcing where even individuals are able to outsource work to far off places. Our company is right in the middle of it. We have busy individuals using our services," says TTK services COO Sunder Prakasham. YourManInIndia provides physical concierge services in India while GetFriday provides virtual assistance to people across the globe. TTK Services was formed in 2000 to provide value added health care facilitation services to NRI dependants in India. In 2004, the company rejigged the business model to become a complete concierge service company for NRIs.

The company, in fact, found a niche in document procurement such as birth and degree certificates and attestation services across the country. YMI has operations in six cities while GetFriday has operations only in Bangalore. "We intend to start another centre (for GetFriday) in Coimbatore in a year," says Mr Sunder.

Declining to divulge revenue details, Mr Sunder said, business has grown 200% and employee base has risen from 80 people to 250 this year. "We intend to scale GetFriday and YourManInIndia over the next 2 years. We are pioneers in the space and we want to keep coming up with innovative offerings for the market. The market is very dynamic and we need to be tuned in all the time," says Mr Sunder

Article 4

Hi again,

http://www.yourmaninindia.comis one of the most unique models of business I have come across. They act as counselor, friend, guardian and whatever else that an NRI would need them to be. They are the eyes, ears, hands and legs of people who live aboard. This is how it works

An NRI can go online and request a specific service. Service could be anything from getting educational documents attested, to helping get a lease signed up for property owned in India, to helping get train tickets for their parents to marriage registration. You name it and they do it.

People who live abroad keep needing several services from India and due to bureaucratic problems, procedural issues and other reasons, getting work done in India is a pain for these guys. Moreover, making sure that lease is signed up with the right person, to house kept in good shape to plain and simple helping keep the garden clean are some of the small small things which make up for a lot of time saved and headaches saved.

My favorite part is where you can subscribe to services to help aging parents. You can have their passports made, tickets obtained, health services taken care off among various other things. It just makes your tensions evaporate.

Just to think of it, it is a very simple business model. There is a definite desire and demand and there is a simple solution. Pay money and get any kind of job accomplished. As we go along, more and more people will need more and more services will be needed.

Infact this service need not be international in nature, it could be inter-state as well. There are so many services that a person needs when he goes in a new city or needs to reconnect with places he or she has been associated with. Eg birth certificate, graduation transcript etc.

I think, knowing the way India works, this service is a perfect antidote to all headaches. In fact they could have an alternate name for their websitehttp://www.headacheoutsourced.com