I have been looking at outsourcing for years for call centers, product customer support and lightweight web development. Now for roughly $5,000 you can rent Indian surrogate mothers. This nominal fee includes agency costs, embryo implantation, and delivery. India has already established itself as an attractive place to conduct this sort of business because the hospitals are good and the costs are low and apparently there are plenty of willing women. In America, by contrast, a complete surrogacy process would cost closer to $50,000.

The leader in this new business wit the Akanksha Clinic at the Kaival hospital in Anand India. The staff at this facility are focused on infertility which boasts a 44% success rate and has a waiting list of more than 1,000 couples. Its created a whole new ecosystem around the service called “reproductive tourism” where hotels, restaurants and excursions are tailored to the donor couples. Lisa Ling who recently produced a piece on Oprah on the service has been taking some heat for her lack of a balanced report on womb outsourcing. I personally have no issue with the the practice for infertile couples but do think its a little scary as I do know a few busy women that probably would have paid the dough rather than going thru pregnancy and delivery. What do you think?

Photo credit: www.scienceclarified.com

When I first heard abut the Tesla 100% electric powered car my inner voice said 2010, if ever.  Then I met the founder Martin Eberhard at the TED conference and heard about how they are engineering and producing this thing with a totally different mind set than Detroit which was inspiring.   He also had secured some amazing funding from one of the fathers of the PayPal success. Martin seemed to have it all figured out including some clever market positioning on the initial model, the Roadster, where it will compete with super high performance vehicles where price, convenient service, etc. is much less of an issue than with a commuter car.  So, with that, I bumped my estimate up to 2009.  Then I read in the Mercury News that the car was delayed for the "third time" to Q1 2008 which is a win in my cynical mind.  I am pretty sure that there that there will not be a fourth time as they have already gone thru all the normal excuses and changed CEO’s.  Still if they can ship 100 cars in the first half of 2008 I think that is a huge accomplishment.  Also that is $10MM in revenues as the cars cost $100,000!  (The second 100 cars will be the bigger accomplishment as there are not that many billionaire tech CEO’s.)

Here is their recent promo video.  This piece is good evidence they need to fire their PR agency.  Who the hell chooses a graffiti laden inner city location for a photo shoot on a $100,000 car?  They must have mixed up the Taser video shoot and Tesla.  Ah, marketers.  They should let Martin do that job.

Picture source: Serious Wheels