When I was doing the initial research for Young World Rising, I spent a lot of time on the Web tracking down promising new companies around the world. A couple of examples were referred to me by friends and experts; others I found from repeated mentions on blogs and social networks. Some had already achieved some recognition by winning innovation awards or getting mentioned in the press. A few would go on to achieve international acclaim and see their founders invited to speak at TED Conferences or attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Then there's Thrillophilia, a web-based adventure travel company based in Bangalore, India. Thrillophilia is not going to cure cancer or solve global warming, and if its founders go to Davos, it will probably be for the awesome snowboarding. Nevertheless, Thrillophilia is at least as exemplary of the trends in Young World entrepreneurship as any of the other cases I picked, and I'm pleased to see that their website, their service and their community continues to evolve.

The first and most obvious quality the company demonstrates is how it uses social media to unite its service with its audience. I didn't find Thrillophilia: they found me, when I was tweeting about my impending research trip to India. I believe they source a lot of their new business by gently skimming through venues like Twitter, looking to open up personal conversations with prospective travelers. Many companies around the world are trying to get this right and failing miserably.

Fluency in the use of social media - particularly the commercial use, which takes a light touch - is, in my view, unique to Net Generation businesses, and is particularly well-suited to the kind of business and audience that Thrillophilia is trying to cultivate. Still, they are not just freewheeling. What I discovered in my conversations with the company's founders is that they work very, very hard to make it look effortless. Just for that, this is a case study worth examining.

Another thing that appealed to me about the company is the way that it is helping to organize an important sector of the local economy in India which will definitely benefit in the aggregate, but lacks the individual resources to invest in itself. This takes a bit of explaining, and I'm still not sure I covered it right in the book.

Prior to starting my work on Young World Rising, I had just completed a research project called "Blue Collar 2.0," which investigated the effects of social media technology on non-information work sectors such as manufacturing, retail and construction. One of the businesses I studied was Angie's List, the online service that allows homeowners to rate the performance of building trades contractors (plumbers, electricians, gardeners, etc.). Ordinarily, those services are delivered as one-off transactions by small, local, "mom-and-pop" operations. The quality of service is inconsistent to say the least, and homeowners rarely have recourse if the work is not satisfactory. By giving homeowners a public forum to discuss the good and bad work of contractors, Angie's List builds durability and visibility into fleeting and opaque relationships - in effect, allowing very small businesses to build a bigger brand than they ordinarily could.

Top performers discovered that a good rating on Angie's List could be worth $2-3 million in additional annual revenues - a huge amount for a small business, and far more than they could ever generate from their own advertising. Overnight, contractors began professionalizing their informal customer service practices and paying some real attention to customer satisfaction. This benefited their businesses, it benefited the market as a whole by improving standards, and it improved the reputation (and earning power) of the entire contracting industry by making it less risky to do business with small, local providers.

Thrillophilia fills the same role for the adventure travel industry. Or, at least, that's the idea. Businesses that cater to tourists are always hit or miss, because tourists come and go, and there's no real penalty for pulling a bait-and-switch or otherwise cutting corners. Thrillophilia provides an incentive to reward good performing businesses with more attention than they could ever afford, while warning people to steer clear of the firms that give everyone a bad reputation.

Thrillophilia, like Angie's List, is doing all this from the customer's point of view. Angie Hicks, founder of Angie's List, was an ordinary homeowner fed up with getting lousy service from contractors. Abhishek Daga, Chitra Gurnani and the other Thrillophiles are young adventure travel enthusiasts fed up with getting ripped off by shady tour companies, or trusting their safety to badly-maintained equipment. But by using social media and networks to make the experience better for themselves, they are also forcing important industries to raise their general level of standards across the board, which in the end, strengthens the entire system.

Finally, Thrillophilia is a pointed response to the lament I heard throughout India. "Our businesses succeed by providing existing services at a cheaper cost, but we will have no real innovation until people are willing to take risks."

As you might expect from a business that caters to folks who throw themselves off bridges and paddle rafts through whitewater rapids, Thrillophilia is anything but risk-averse. The founders of the company gave up good, well-paid jobs with international IT companies - the kind of jobs that young Indians and their families dream of - to pursue their passion. This is par for the course for young entrepreneurs in the US, but both the financial risk and the opportunity cost are magnified in Young World countries like India. And if they succeed, they will inspire others. That, as I say in the book, is a trend worth watching.