An innovative South Africa energy management solution reaches the final of the Urban App Challenge and receives appraisal from Nokia and AppCampus in Aalto University in Finland. 

Finland, Helsinki - June 7th 2013 -Methys, an international technology company focused on big data and digital innovation, presented today at the AppCampus event at Aalto University in Finland, Kwami, an innovative community driven utilities management mobile application enabling users to share and learn together how to better manage their energy costs. The Kwami solution, initially developed on the Windows mobile framework, includes an inexpensive 3rd party hardware component enabling your electricity meter data to be securely sent to the cloud, and a mobile application to capture this data and allow users to monitor the energy consumption of their home, whenever and wherever they are, share it and benchmark it with friends, neighbours, colleagues. The concept developed by Methys’ South African team, was selected as part of the South African Urban App competition by AppCampus over 2,600 submissions for seed acceleration and funding with the support of Nokia and Microsoft.

Sebastien Lacour, Kwami Project Manager at Methys Labs said "Leveraging on the experience Methys has built in recent year with big data, social analytics, and energy management, the Kwami project offers some useful features for the future smart homes and an interesting business model based on social data and demand response incentives. With this project, we truly aim at contributing to an educational experience for all, and a more dynamic demand management framework to support Utilities effort to optimise their delivery".

Christophe Viarnaud, Chairman of the Methys group, added "Kwami, created by the Methys Labs in Cape Town’s Silicon Cape, is the 4th start up project we are generating in less than 3 years. It demonstrates our ability to leverage on our core expertise in big data, mobile application and eCommerce to generate business ideas which rapidly become successful business ventures. Kwami is an interesting application contributing to the internet of things. We believe it may become the most advanced mobile energy dashboard for the smart home, based on a solution affordable for most homes, that will certainly help grow knowledge, reduce cost and carbon footprint. We look forward to the future progress of this venture.”

To keep yourself informed on the release of the application, you can already register onhttp://kwami.launchrock.com.