One of our guests at The Cube is James Ferguson, CEO of kWIQly. The very first thing we noticed about this startup is the rather interesting spelling of its company, which Ferguson explained right away; kW stands for kilowatts, “IQ” for intelligence, and “ly” for quickly.

A little background about kWIQly: they’re a consultancy company that helps buildings save energy through finding energy saving opportunities and applying pattern recognition to energy consumption data. They developed an intelligent software in the cloud that enables them to do this. Among their notable customers are the Tower of London and HaniWells.

Ferguson comes to us all the way from Switzerland. He was attracted to Fluent because he sees the top technology guys who attend the conference as “very open and very friendly” and can provide his company various kinds of support.

kWIQly does not only collect data, deliver results and report back to clients in an easily digestible format, but also analyzes these data for anomalies. The service gathers weather data as well as energy data while identifying different types of heat sources, power junctions, and other architectural elements combined with the data to see if there are any algorithmic problems.

To understand how KWIQly helps its clients by identifying anomalies, Ferguson explained:

“Let’s say you’ve got a power cut. You got to reset your VCR back because it’s in your face. Somewhere up in the loft or down the basement, there’s an old water boiler there and it’s time for it to stop. Now, it’s heating at the wrong time of the day because it didn’t get fixed. And I suppose more relevant to big buildings is daylight savings change. All the control systems there, this great control equipment, it’s got to be programmed and people haven’t specified it, it doesn’t change. It says you’ve been heating for 9 hours instead of 8 hours in the day.”

Ferguson added that buildings waste 1.5 trillion dollars worth of energy per year, and this is what his company is trying to address. For an individual household, it may only be a few hundred dollars, but if you look at universities and large commercial establishments, the issue is much much bigger than we can imagine.

Watch the interview in full below!