SharedSolar has been selected as a finalist in the 2013 Vodafone challenge. It’s an honor, and we’re in the company of some amazing innovations and innovators, past and present. It was great to meet fellow finalists, organizers and judges at the Vodafone xone in San Francisco, centered around the theme of “Mobile for Good – enabling mobile technology to deliver social change.”

It’s worth noting how the Mobile/IT revolution has been instrumental for us in providing a grid-like electric service with intermittent renewables. Our on-site servers run on processors designed for mobile phones – low cost, low power, less heat. The IT hardware costs are negligible with the addition of these platforms, but the flexibility we can bring with our hosted software is huge. We provide customer service by leveraging the existing mobile network infrastructure, with mobile handsets as the interface between customers and the operators. Wireless LAN’s support our mobile app that local agents use for payment collection, management and local overrides. Our enterprise management system also uses the mobile network infrastructure for communicating with the sites.

Without these mobile computing and communications platforms, it would not have been possible for us to deploy and operate sustainable electric services in the regions and communities that we are in. And we’re extremely happy and excited to have been given this chance to participate and showcase our solutions.

More on the announcement and the challenge here – http://www.vodafone-us.com/wireless-innovation-project/current-competition/2013-finalists/