I cover the tech scene between the Baltimore and Capital Beltways.
The name Forgitit summarizes the startup’s mission: to create a consumer energy service that works so simply that it can be forgotten. It monitors three things: energy rates in the user’s deregulated market, his individual usage, and billing data. For $30 per year, users get rate monitoring, usage monitoring, energy efficiency monitoring, real-time billing monitoring, and automatic rate-switching when rates change. Though Forgitit does rate switching, it is different from the so-called “switch sites” that aggregate energy provider information and encourage users to bounce back and forth between providers for a headhunting fee. Forgitit is more in the business of that beloved post-cloud buzzword: big data.
Forgitit households are monitored for energy usage and their efficiency is calculated based upon different variables such as the square footage of the home, and all the data is put toward a greater energy consumption metric.
“We took some technology that I knew worked for big corporate energy audits and ported that down to the residential level to find the best way we can manage residential electricity. That’s where the idea of Forgitit was born,” co-founder Michael Jordan said. “Once we got into it, we discovered there’s a ton of data going on about your house that’s not really interpreted for you. When you buy a car, you know the miles per gallon and efficiency. But you don’t really know if 100 kWh is a good rate for a thousand square foot house because the benchmark isn’t clear. Everything you do is comparative. If it’s hot out, you have a good benchmark for what ‘hot’ is, but you don’t know if a dollar per square foot is a good rate to be paying for your house. That’s the information we want to give people to let them exploit that data for their good. That’s the idea of the product.”
The service will provide this additional data to subscribers via a Web-based (and eventually app-based) dashboard, and it works with all standard electrical meters; from “dumb” ones all the way up to smart meters.
“We’re going to do the best with what you have, and give you the most information,” Jordan said. “As we get more customers and more data, the benchmark with get tighter. When you learn all about the customers in your market, that’s when you can give them cool products.”
Like a lot of startups, Forgitit cited Intuit Intuit‘s Mint and Apple’s iOS as inspirations for elegance and user-friendliness. The service’s dashboard should provide enough information to appease the early adopter and data hungry user types, but it can just as easily be run as a background service for people simply looking to have a keep a running tab on their energy consumption so they can be alerted when any billing spikes take place.
At just $30 per year, it’s cheap enough to set and forget.