Small ideas, Large impact

Monsoons are not the best time for the electronics on your shelves or in your pockets. Every monsoon, my television conks off and the circuit board needs to be dried with a hair dryer to make it work again. We must watch mandatory hours of television everyday to keep the circuit dry so the unit runs smoothly. Panasonic authorized dealers (as recommended in the warranty booklet, if you happened to store it somewhere) dilly-dally you for an appointment for 3-4 days and then charge Rs. 700/- per visit to get the job done. It is quite frustrating to wait for them to come through especially when the Euro Championships are on, and there is live scheduled programming that you must watch.

Yesterday morning, I serendipitously received an SMS from JustDial (which I am a fan of) prompting me to call them if I needed a TV technician. So I did, and after a one minute call, received an SMS with contacts of 5 technicians in my neighborhood. I called the nearest one, and after a two minute call with a person who understood the problem, an appointment was scheduled for later in the evening. When I got home for dinner, the TV was up and running with a total damage of Rs. 350/-. I was watching the news of a juvenile skirmish amongst Congress party workers during a rally in Mumbai. Life as usual.

An ordeal that I had accepted to live with as a consumer every once a year, had turned into a seamless fix. This is the power of information flow over the phone, and how millions of Indians are using the phone as a medium to make their daily lives better. Lowering the convenience barrier for a large number of consumers, is not just about making old things easier. It usually amounts to making new things happen, which were earlier not possible. Many large businesses pop out of nowhere when they are able to address this latent need in seemingly obvious ways. In India, the phone presents a medium to tap into many such opportunities.