ocial personal finance website Wesabe and personal energy tracker WattzOn today announced a partnership to help consumers more easily quantify, understand and reduce their personal energy consumption. WattzOn will use Wesabe's technology to facilitate the automatic upload of consumers' utility bills to its site, while Wesabe members will be able to see both the financial and environmental impact of their spending.
Named "Best Idea 2008" by Businessweek, WattzOn.com provides users with an online tool to calculate, compare, understand and budget their personal energy consumption. By partnering with Wesabe, WattzOn will be able to more accurately quantify how much consumers spend on utilities by pulling this data directly from their individual bills.
Wesabe, an online finance manager that lets members view all of their bank and credit card accounts and transactions in one place, will use WattzOn's knowledgebase to show members' purchases in both dollars and watts. Members will also have access to WattzOn's wealth of comparison tools and recommendations.
"People tend to chronically underestimate their energy usage. By incorporating Wesabe's technology to automatically upload utility bills to WattzOn, we eliminate the guesswork and give consumers an exact picture of their home energy usage trends," said Raffi Krikorian, chief product officer and co-founder of WattzOn. "Just as Wesabe helps people better understand and budget their money, our goal is to help people better understand and budget their energy consumption."
"WattzOn will serve as a currency converter for Wesabe members, letting them see their spending not only in dollars, but in actual watts. In addition to providing a dual financial and environmental view of energy usage, WattzOn will also help our members better understand their individual energy consumption and the far-reaching effects of cutting back," said Marc Hedlund, CEO of Wesabe.
Wesabe and WattzOn plan to launch their integrated application at the March O'Reilly ETech conference in San Jose, where Krikorian will be presenting a talk titled "WattzOn: Crowdsourcing a Solution to Climate Change."