That is the case of Hicosy a project stemming among several proposals of innovative business ideas coming from an internal competition to foster innovation within company’s employees community.

In 2013 a project in the field of energy monitoring won the challenge. That led, a year later, to the creation inside Concept Reply of a dedicated team focused on the implementation of that idea. The main element that made Hicosy a winner was the idea to pool two fundamental aspects in the evolution of technology and business: the growing community of makers, linked to the Open Hardware concept, and the emerging environmental consciousness that is making Green Energy a very important sector.

Hicosy underlying idea is to create an object that goes beyond the traditional concept of “product” and give the community of makers an easy to use framework, allow to monitor production and consumption of electricity. Furthermore, based on open standards, Hicosy lets advanced users customize the platform and extend its functionalities.

Breaking down the concept of “closed” products, Hicosy is based on Arduino Yún (and chip ATMEL ATmega32u4) and it is designed to be easily assembled and connected to the inverter of a photovoltaic system and to a smart meter to check in real time both production and consumption of energy. The Hicosy KIT includes the firmware and a ready to use responsive web service to monitor the production and consumption from any desktop computer or mobile device.

With the goal of creating a community that will change the way energy is monitored, the team wanted to involve early adopters using Indiegogo crowdfunding platform.