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: frustrations in dealing with customer-service call centres in India. At the least, the spread of remotely delivered personal services will be a real test of globalisation at the grassroots level.

Even optimists acknowledge the obstacles. In a report this year, Evalueserve, a research firm, predicted that “person-to-person offshoring,” both consumer services and services for small businesses, would grow rapidly, to more than $2 billion by 2015. Yet consumer services, in particular, are in a “nascent phase,” said Alok Aggarwal, chairman of Evalueserve.

Veterans of the business offshoring boom predict an emerging market, but most are not investing. Nandan M Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys, said that there is “definitely an opportunity in the globalisation of consumer services,” and he listed several possibilities, even psychological counselling and religious confessionals. But, he added in an e-mail message, “This is just ‘blue sky’ thinking! We have no business interest at this point in this direction.”

What the offshore consumer services industry needs, it seems, is a solid success story.

A leading candidate to watch, according to analysts, is TutorVista, a tutoring service founded two years ago by Krishnan Ganesh, a 45-year-old Indian entrepreneur and a pioneer of offshore call centres.

TutorVista also stands out for its well-known venture backers, its scale and its ambition. The two-year-old company has raised more than $15 million from investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Silicon Valley Bank. “Our vision is to be part of the monthly budget of 1 million families,” Ganesh said.

It is a long-term goal. To date, TutorVista has signed up 10,000 subscribers in the US, and its British service, rolled out in September, has 1,000.

Last year, Ernest Tham, a truck driver, noticed a reference to TutorVista on a web site and suggested his son give it a try. “Kenneth was apprehensive at first, and I wasn't sure how it would work,” Tham said. “But, shocking to say, it's gone very well.”

Kenneth said he initially found it “very unusual, not seeing another person. You get used to it, though. It's not a problem.” He schedules one or two sessions nearly every day, mainly for English and Chemistry. With a digital pen and palette, he writes sentences and grammar exercises, for example, and his work appears on his computer screen and on the screen of his tutor. They discuss the lessons using Internet-telephone headsets.