By Prashant Mahesh

An office in India, without you having to supervise it personally, seems to be a great idea. After all, there seems to be a lot of foreign businessmen keen to run a business in India. But, there are fears, which are understandable. Not being able to understand the local language and wary of corruption, these foreign businessmen are thirsting for help. Finally, they have help coming form Indiafamily.com.

Indiafamily.com is promoted by the Mumbai-based Mahendra Sureka. The site has taken off and to begin with it is offering virtual office facilities in Mumbai.

In future, Sureka plans to spread this concept to other Indian cities such as Surat, Calcutta and Delhi and even overseas. Indiafamily.com plans to offer a virtual office which will work for you. This simply saves the foreign company a lot of costs and hassles: one need not invest money in expensive real estate and can avoid manpower costs. For starters, simple services such as a local address and a mail box for collection of letters are provided at $100 a month or $1,000 a year. If a corporate entity wants a few more facilities such as an office with a dedicated telephone line and secretarial assistance, it would cost $500 a month.

This is just the beginning. After sometime, Indiafamily.com plans to get into a wide gamut of services that includes travel assistance, surveys on brands and legal assistance. Basically, Indiafamily.com wants to get into all sorts of advisory services on the web itself. Income from these services is the revenue model for Indiafamily.com. During the first year of operations, it plans to register at least 50 clients.

In a bid to draw traffic to the site, Indiafamily.com plans to provide several free services to the site-visitor. One such facility, which is currently on offer, is this: sending a hard copy of an e-mail by post to any recipient in India. Here it hopes to earn revenue from companies which may come forward to provide stationary free of cost. Similarly, reputed greeting card brands such as Archies will be delivered free of cost to anyone in India. Here the company hopes to earn revenues through advertisements on envelopes. Since cards are something which are preserved, it would have a long-term effect and hence the advertisers get value.

Healthcare at doorstepHere is the story of another niche B2B player. Monalisa Multiplast is one brick-and-mortar player which has jumped on to the Net bandwagon in quest of new business opportunities. Says managing director Azam Khan: “Since the Internet business needs a continuous investment of money, it is essential to have a profitable business before diversifying onto the Internet.” Monalisa Multiplast has launched a couple of niche portals to mark its foray into the Internet business.

The first portal it has launched is Propertyrealestate.com, a portal website on the property and construction sectors. Moving a step further, the company has entered the lucrative healthcare market with the launch of its second portal healthcarehouse.com.

Monalisa Multiplast claims that it is the first healthcare portal in India. The basic objective of the healthcare portal: allow Net-users access to all information relating to medical and health information and alongside offer expert advice on the Net. The site has special features such as e-business in medical and healthcare areas, free web page hosting to qualified doctors, an employment exchange, a search facility to look for doctors, chemists, nurses, utilities, hospitals and nursing homes anywhere in India. Monalisa Multiplast plans to make its text on the portal extremely simple that even a lay person can understand. There is more for the lay person: the site offers free service to its registered members, who can avail of medical consultation from one of the doctors listed on the panel. In a bid to make this a reality, Monalisa Multiplast has already enlisted 40 doctors on its panel. Not just medical advisory services, the site has plans to offer legal consultation for medico-legal cases and providedetails about laws governing the medical sector. The response time: three days.

How does healthcarehouse.com propose to generate revenue? Monalisa Multiplast has an e-business section which allows purchases and sales of any product related to the medical and healthcare sectors. Here is how it works: once a buyer places an inquiry for any item, it is passed on to the company’s panel of suppliers, who in turn give their most competitive offers. These offers are then vetted by the company’s team of experts and the best offer in terms of price is passed on to the prospective buyer. Now the buyer has the option to evaluate the offer on his own and place an order if he is satisfied. As far as Monalisa Multiplast is concerned, it earns a small commission on every trade that takes place on its site.