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India is a country where tens of millions of people don’t have access to a trained health professional that can give them basic health and wellness advice. The Bangalore-based mobile services company mDhil wants to change that.
印度極其缺乏訓(xùn)練有素的醫(yī)療專家，幾千萬人無法獲得基本的衛(wèi)生和健康咨詢服務(wù)。總部位于班加羅爾的移動服務(wù)公司mDhil希望能夠改變這種狀況。
“India faces a tremendous shortage of doctors,” says Nandu Madhava, the Texas-raised, Harvard-educated social entrepreneur who started mDhil in 2009. “People would turn to quacks and old myths for health information that is rarely grounded in any science. We’re working to alleviate that problem.”
“醫(yī)生極度匱乏是印度面臨的一個老大難問題，”南渡o瑪達瓦說。這位在德州長大，畢業(yè)于哈佛大學(xué)(Harvard University)的社會企業(yè)家于2009年創(chuàng)辦了mDhil公司。“人們經(jīng)常通過江湖郎中和古老的神話來獲取幾乎沒有任何科學(xué)依據(jù)的健康信息。我們正在努力緩解這一問題。”
Madhava’s company started as an SMS messaging service where people paid for advice, but the approach failed to scale beyond a subscriber base of about 250,000. Two years ago, Madhava, a 40ish American expat of Indian origin, decided to take a different tack.
瑪達瓦的公司起初從事有償醫(yī)療短信服務(wù)，但這種方式無法推動用戶群在達到大約25萬人之后繼續(xù)增長。兩年前，這位40歲左右的印度裔美國人決定采取另一種策略。
“With a shift to 3G networks and low cost phones with mobile browsers, we made a strategic decisions to focus on mobile videos,” says Madhava, who worked for the Peace Corps and Goldman Sachs before launching mDhil.
瑪達瓦說：“隨著用戶轉(zhuǎn)向3G網(wǎng)絡(luò)，紛紛使用配備移動瀏覽器的低成本手機，我們做出了一個專注于移動視頻的戰(zhàn)略決策。”創(chuàng)辦mDhil之前，瑪達瓦曾任職于和平隊(Peace Corps)和高盛公司(Goldman Sachs)。
mDhil has since reached 20 million video views globally, fueled by a strong preference by people in the developing world—far stronger than in the developed world–for services optimized for mobile devices.
自那以后，mDhil的全球瀏覽量已經(jīng)達到2,000萬次，主要推動力之一是發(fā)展中國家民眾對面向移動設(shè)備的優(yōu)化服務(wù)有著強烈的偏好——這種偏好遠大于發(fā)達國家。
“This makes a lot of business sense as most Indians connect to the Internet through their mobile phones,” says Katyayan Gupta, an eBusiness and channel strategy analyst at Forrester Research in New Delhi, India. “In most developing countries, including Brazil or China, Internet companies have to be mobile-first. I see this trend soon becoming the norm.”
“這種做法頗具商業(yè)頭腦，因為大多數(shù)印度人是通過手機上網(wǎng)的，”常駐印度新德里的弗雷斯特研究公司(Forrester Research)電子商務(wù)和渠道策略分析師卡蒂亞揚o古普塔說。“在大多數(shù)發(fā)展中國家，包括巴西和中國，互聯(lián)網(wǎng)公司必須采用移動優(yōu)先原則。我認為這種趨勢很快就會成為常態(tài)。”
Sandy Shen, a research director with Gartner in Shanghai, concurs. “Mobile is a top priority for many providers looking for future growth, she says, “and this is an area where lots of innovation is happening.”
上海高德納咨詢公司(Gartner) 研究總監(jiān)桑迪o沈贊同這種觀點。“移動應(yīng)用是許多尋求未來增長的服務(wù)提供商最優(yōu)先考慮的方向，”她說。“這個領(lǐng)域的創(chuàng)新層出不窮。”
At present about 65 percent of mDhil’s traffic comes from mobile devices, but that figure is expected to grow to 90 percent in just two years. Since dropping its subscription model, the company leverages its partnership with YouTube and other online channels to make money from advertising, licensing, and sponsorships.
mDhil目前約有65%的流量來自移動設(shè)備，但在僅僅兩年后，這個數(shù)字預(yù)計就將增長到90%。自從放棄訂閱模式以來，這家公司利用它跟YouTube和其他在線渠道結(jié)成的合作關(guān)系，通過廣告、許可使用和贊助等方式來獲得收入。
“Their main revenue model is to charge for ads and not the consumer,” Gupta says. “This is a common practice. Facebook follows the same approach.”
“他們的主要收入來源是廣告商，而不是消費者，”古普塔說。“這是一種常見的做法。Facebook也采用相同的策略。”
By making the service essentially free at the front end, apart from the cost of Internet access, mDhil has been able to quickly scale to millions of users. It gauges the effectiveness of its advice in a number of ways.
這樣一來，除了上網(wǎng)費，前端用戶基本上無需支付任何費用。依憑這種方式，mDhil迅速贏得了數(shù)百萬用戶。這家公司通過多種方式來評估醫(yī)療建議的有效性。
“If we create great videos, we get more users both in terms of watch time and social media activity,” Madhava says.
瑪達瓦說：“如果我們創(chuàng)作了非常優(yōu)質(zhì)的視頻，無論是根據(jù)觀看時間還是根據(jù)社交媒體活躍度來觀察，我們都會獲得更多的用戶。”
For example, women felt better informed after watching videos on subjects such as puberty, reproductive health, and birth control, according to field studies mDhil performed in conjunction with urban NGOs.
例如，根據(jù)mDhil聯(lián)合多家城市非政府組織所做的實地研究，在觀看了諸如青春期、生殖健康和節(jié)育等主題的視頻之后，婦女的健康意識顯著增強。
It’s of particular importance in India, where long-standing cultural taboos discourage the creation and distribution of high-quality health content in local Indian languages.
這一點在印度具有特別重要的意義，因為這個國家長期存在的文化禁忌阻止使用當?shù)卣Z言創(chuàng)造和傳播高品質(zhì)的健康內(nèi)容。
And as for a developed market where this is less of a factor? mDhil “absolutely” has a chance of being a hit in the United States, Madhava says. “We’ve started creating health and wellness content with a global audience in mind.”
那么，mDhil能否在一個并不存在這種禁忌的發(fā)達國家市場獲得成功呢？mDhil“絕對”有機會風(fēng)靡美國，瑪達瓦說。“我們已經(jīng)開始制作面向全球觀眾的衛(wèi)生和健康內(nèi)容。”
Some of mDhil’s newest online video channels receive 80 percent of their viewership from people in the U.S. and Europe, Madhava says. (The subject matter and tone is different from the company’s India-focused content—you can see examples here and here—but Madhava stresses that mDhil’s Bangalore team can produce videos for audiences in the developed world for a fraction of what it would cost in the West.)
瑪達瓦說，在mDhil最新推出的一些網(wǎng)絡(luò)視頻渠道中，有80%的瀏覽量來自美國和歐洲。（這些視頻的主題和風(fēng)格有別于這家公司面向印度市場推出的內(nèi)容，但瑪達瓦強調(diào)，mDhil的班加羅爾團隊能夠生產(chǎn)面向發(fā)達國家觀眾的視頻，而且花費僅僅是在西方國家制作同類視頻成本的一小部分。）
But India sits at the center of Madhava’s mission. “It’s going to take entrepreneurs to help build this country into all that it can be,” he says.
不過，印度仍然在這家公司的使命中占據(jù)著中心位置。他說：“這個國家需要一些企業(yè)家來幫助它實現(xiàn)潛能。”
