After spending a month looking at different products out there I've recommended that we go with the AMDL bluetooth printer paired with a Nokia 5000 or Nokia 3110C cell phone.
The Access printer is a simple 2 inch thermal printer that is made in India (assembled in Bangalore). This is what makes it very attractive. Anything we import is slapped with import duty, putting the printer squarely out of our price bracket. Having a restrictive price range helped since it quickly narrowed the search down (can't help but contrast this with my profligate ways at the "hedge fund"). The cell phone-printer combination costs around Rs 13000 (~USD 260). This printer is also used by ALW, increasing its attractiveness for us because our bulk numbers increase lowering the price of this device.
This brings us to the next stage of the project - development. The tech team has been working for a week trying to figure out how to communicate via bluetooth etc. etc. Interestingly AMDL provides no software support, no API's no anything. Can you imagine buying a hardware device and not getting any support on how to communicate with the device? I guess this is why it's so much cheaper than any of the other options (Zebra, produced in Europe, costs ~Rs 20,000). There are cheaper printers that we could buy in China (how do the Chinese do it?), but it would make no sense for us since it would come with 0 local after sales support. Someone should try and solve this problem - how can a firm that has a good solid cheap product quickly establish itself in a market to sell it's goods with little upfront costs (an on the ground distribution network that can easily be leveraged by different vendors?).
As we move into the development cycle, I'm getting more downtime. I'm probably going to undertake a microfinance project mapping out Category A loans. More on that in future posts.
Keeping my fingers crossed now for a successful pilot
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