Water utilities that want to get accurate and frequent data from their water meters have to manually drive by all the locations they want data from, - or they have to install costly permanent infrastructure like antennas. This drives up cost of getting data to the utility, in turn driving up cost of water to consumers.
The gain for utilities is that when they have frequent data they can much easier locate leaks in their water distribution network etc. Frequent data will enable the utility to do more data analysis and be able to act proactively, in turn driving the price of water down.
The Pokemon Go for Water meter reading has consumers out and about collecting data to save on their bills and save water in their community.
Smaller water companies serving rural areas. The longer the distances, the more costly the infrastructure or manual data collection.
The standard solution is that water company employees driving around in their car collecting the data while passing every meter at a distance of less than 100 meter driving less than 50 km/h.
Solution Ideas:
Must provide an incentive (gamification or credits) for consumers to accept the idea.
Must make it interesting/attractive enough that enough consumers adopt the game, so that the utility gets more than 80% of data consistently and 100% on a monthly/quarterly basis.