H2bid and lowering the price of water access.

Check this out. A young entrepreneur with a purpose. He's (along with his dad) one of the people participating in the Forbes.com "Boost Your Business Contest". It's obviously good marketing, but I also found the story behind this particular company interesting. So I asked him to shoot me a summary of what he does and why he does it. Check it out. On another note, I also found Reba Smith's The Educational Outback to be another interesting company deserved of a good look. Ironically they are the two sole black contestants. Perhaps not so ironically, their companies are the most relevant to addressing people's basic needs.

H2bid is the result of conversations between my dad [Glenn Oliver] and I [Christien Christien Oliver]. My father used to serve on the Detroit Water Board. He would come home from his Board meetings and tell me how frustrated that the Board was spending millions of dollars on water and wastewater services, and they weren't necessarily getting the most competitive bid.

There was simply no way to guarantee that the contractors with the best prices and best services would get the job.

I always thought about it like: "If I need my car fixed, I'm going to save money by getting as many estimates as I can. There is a lot more money at stake when you need a sewer rehabilitated, so these utilities should definitely be considering all their options. Plus, taxpayer dollars are at stake!"

After thinking about this for a while we decided that the best way to deal with this issue would be to create a central place online where utilities and vendors could find each other. We designed H2bid.com so that any utility (or company) can post a water or wastewater contract opportunity for free.

This process only takes a couple of minutes. After its posted, anyone in the world can find it and bid on it. We sell access to the contract opportunities for only $7.95. We post thousands of contract opportunities from around the world each year so there is money to be made. We definitely hope to build a successful business, but after two years of operating H2bid.com we have learned there was much more at stake in the water and wastewater industries than money.

Half of all hospital beds in the world are occupied by someone suffering from a water-related illness.

In developing countries most diseases stem from people not having access to safe water.

One human being dies every 3.5 seconds from drinking contaminated water.

The worldwide water crisis is real; so real that the United Nations got some rapper guy named Sean Carter to talk about it on MTV.

All jokes aside, one of our goals is that H2bid.com will help improve freshwater access in developing countries. We believe this goal is realistic because H2bid.com is the only website of its kind.

By putting these contract opportunities online, there is more competition for these contracts, which will make the prices cheaper.

In the case of building a desalination plant, where the cost is enormous, even small savings can free up millions for other important water projects. We hope that savings from our online market place will provide some relief for the more than 1,000,000,000 people that get water-related diseases every year.