The cost of us "collecting", that is getting money owed to us by our franchisees can be an insane percentage of what we actually collect.   Many times, we have to make 4-hour and 6-hour trips to franchisees only to be told "come back tomorrow."  We often have no choice, as our machines are in their posession and operate whether they pay us or not, and the enforceability of small contracts through non-brute-force means is questionable.  No wonder most other people trying to do what we do cover their capital costs up-front (we are attempting a model that recovers capital through the cash flow of water sales, therefore vesting our interests in the performance of our franchises).

As we are obsessed with finding innovative ways to make our model work (behind a fixed price-point for our end product), we are realizing that our greatest ally is a technology that has immense power, the mobile phone's SIM card.

Our first move has been to develop a remote monitoring system for our machines in rural areas - they send us text messages everytime they turn on and off - giving us all kinds of information on the health of the machine, input and output water quality, and more importantly on how it is being operated and how well our franchisees are doing.   The kick, however, is that we now have the ability to shut it down and change operating parameters from afar.

Similarly, as part of our involvement in the Ripple Effect initiative by Acumen/IDEO, we are also developing rural water "ATMs", that allow penetration into smaller villages where there are few houses, but we can deliver filtered water daily.  Customers use a pre-paid RFID card that has a credit balance of water units, which they can dispense 24/7, and it works under solar power!  Of course, it also connects to our servers by a SIM card.

We're now working on modifications to cheap cell phones that turn into point-of-sale devices to take input on all customer transactions at franchise point, or when water is delivered.

This stuff may sound interesting, but it is critical to making our business model work, and cannot be done without the existence of mobile phones.   We still have not even begun to explore the opportunities in organizational efficiency that will be possible with things like Android phones, which I imagine will be available for cheap in the developing world within a year or two - our staff could report on activities, we could manage service and maintence (we already accept service requests by only SMS), we could do customer surveys.....

I'm convinced that one of the greatest innovation enablers in India is the penetration of mobile service.