Harnessing Expat Communities for Grameen

My wife and I are hosting Alex Counts, President of Grameen Fund USA, in a lunch and dinner in Shanghai. We sent out the invitation through numerous Shanghai expat organizations. I'm wondering why this approach hasn't been done in other expat-heavy cities (e.g., HK, Singapore, KL, etc). Seems to me expat orgs are perfect concentrations of influential and wealthy individuals who are open-minded and entrepreneurial (almost by definition for them to go work overseas). Seems like they would be the perfect audience for donors to a venture philanthropy like Grameen.

Geni for APAC?

I've started working at Geni.com and am trying to figure out the applicability of Geni to the APAC market. Does the idea work everywhere in the world or only in certain areas? In the US where extended families aren't as tight, there's the "discovery" element of finding long lost relatives. Will this work in Asia where many of the cultures are centered around the family?

I came from PayPal. eBay had a bit of this problem. In the US, eBay's network started off through the avid searchers of collectibles. However, in China, the users are much more pragmatic, searching for "new, in-season" items instead, so a lot of the excitement and "thrill of discovery" doesn't exist.