Breaking the barriers of the digital divide, improving people’s lifestyles, and at the same time, being in line with sustainability are concepts that are increasingly present in companies when designing products and services.

In fact, in 2018, the Deusto Declaration of Human Rights in Digital Environments was one of the first to talk about the importance of humanizing technology and since then everything has been evolving, either by the same constant movement of digital transformation or by the adaptability to today’s life.

In this article we tell you all about purpose-driven purpose-driven technology and its goal to develop a more sustainable universe..

What is purposeful technology?

It is a trend that consists of combining human development with technological development, also taking into account ethics and responsibility in its use.. In other words, it is using technology to solve problems and create solutions that have a positive impact on society and the environment. For example, a technology company can create a renewable energy device that reduces dependence on fossil fuels and helps combat climate change.

In the meantime, talking about technology with purpose is almost mandatory if you want your products or services to be relevant and have a purpose that is not merely commercial. After all, it is people who choose to buy, so we must design to best meet their needs.

Characteristics of purposeful technology

Due to the digital transformation and the profile of a new consumer who requires fast, effective solutions that are in line with their principles, the use of technology with a purpose is increasingly necessary.

For this reason, it is referred to as “the 4 A’s” that characterize it.

• Adequate: Should be thought out taking into account environmental, ethical, cultural, social and economic aspects of the targeted community.
• Accessible: must ensure that technological resources are available to any type of audience, with or without disabilities of any kind. Anything that refers to inclusiveness is also part of purposeful technology.
• Affordable: it needs to be adapted to developing countries or populations with poor Internet connectivity. Although in the world there are more than 5 billion people who have access to it, the digital divide still exists.
• Adapted to the population: Must be versatile to the public’s knowledge of technology.

Benefits of purposeful technology for businesses

Implementing a more sustainable lifestyle not only personally but also in business has many advantages. From applications that help raise awareness about the rational use of energy to clothing that measures cardiac functions, sustainability is among us and businesses should think of this trend as a great ally.

Today’s triple impact companies continue to grow, a very good thing for purposeful technology. Its use can have many benefits in organizationsespecially for those operating in the utilities sector. Widergy highlights the following advantages:

Cost reduction

For example, utilities can use smart energy metering technology to reduce meter reading costs and improve data accuracy.

Increased efficiency and productivity

It is achieved by automating processes and reducing the need for human intervention.

Optimization of service quality

And all thanks to better management and planning of resources and processes.

Advantages of purposeful technology for society and environment

This type of trend also has benefits for improving the way technology relates to the social environment and ecology for example in:

Sustainability

It can reduce environmental impact and help protect natural resources for future generations.

Efficiency

It does this through cost reduction and productivity improvements.

Accessibility

Purposeful technology can be used to provide access to education, healthcare and other essential services through digital and mobile platforms.

Equity

Reducing socioeconomic disparities and fostering inclusion are more characteristic of the purposeful use of technological resources.

Innovation

Of course, their use helps to create new and creative solutions to social and environmental challenges. Encouraging collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking is key to generating fresh ideas and easy resolutions to persistent problems.

Technology with purpose and sustainability: reducing impacts on society

Now, how can purposeful technology help generate greater sustainability on the planet? In several ways and we mention some of them!

Promoting the maximization of energy efficiency

The technology can be used to improve the energy efficiency of buildings, factories and other systems, reducing energy consumption and thus greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, building automation systems can control lighting, air conditioning and heating to reduce energy consumption. Factories can implement real-time monitoring technologies to identify areas where energy consumption can be reduced. The uses are many, we just have to start doing it.

Encouraging the development of renewable energy sources

Its implementation is key to deploy, for example, solar and wind energy. Both are important to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuels.

To do so, companies can invest in solar panels or purchase renewable energy. In addition, energy storage systems can be used for later use.

Generating solutions that take the circular economy into account

Minimizing waste and optimizing the use of resources are the keys to the circular economy. For example, companies can implement waste management systems that promote the reduction, reuse and recycling of materials. In addition, the technology can be used to create more durable products.

For an increasingly sustainable present and future

As we have seen, if we use it for a particular purpose, technology is a great tool for implementing sustainable, equitable and ethical development for the environment, society and business. sustainable, equitable and ethical development for the environment, society and business..

From Widergy we make technology with purpose and help utilities reimagine their role, reinvent themselves and move into the future..

What if we could design what’s next? What if we relied on collective power? What if evolution were in our hands?
Contact us at
and let’s generate together the change we need.

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We also review trends in the industry we are passionate about with those who, like us, are focused on technology, innovation and sustainability.

On this occasion we were joined by experts who added their views on issues that call us for the near future.

Anita Figueiredo, Founder and Managing Partner of Proteína Marketing, spoke about the keys to experience design focused on smart audiences. Consumers are increasingly demanding and aware of their power, and it is essential to know their needs so that their experience with utilities at each touchpoint is not random but as it was intended and designed.

Then, Carlos Ortiz from Boston Consulting Group and Guillermo González, from AWS, shared their views on the short-term challenges for utilities, the trends in the world, the steps of this evolution in Latin America, the possibilities that are opening up in a new energy market and the relationship between utilities and their customers.

Thanks to those who joined us in the live transmission and added their comments during and after the event. We leave with many ideas to continue thinking and creating the future of utilities.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you can do it here.

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We confirm our intention to accompany utilities in their evolution in a new energy market, to provide solutions that are committed to caring for the planet and are designed for audiences that are increasingly connected and involved in their decisions regarding the consumption of natural resources.

We envision and plan for 2022 with great excitement, with multiple projects focused on continuing to create solutions for an industry, the utilities industry, that is rapidly moving towards a more connected, more inclusive and a more sustainable future.

And above all, we are betting on continuing to create a better future for utilities, for the community and for each member of the #WidergyFamily.

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It is the same, because we continue with our purpose and commitment to bring innovation to the utilities industry. It is different, because we grew up and prepared for a future where we want to do much, much more.

This desire to do more is the answer to the trust that each client has placed in Widergy, associating us with their evolution, allowing us to accompany them in their design for the future. That confidence makes us happy.

We want Widergy to become a global company that is recognized for its solutions and technology. We seek to innovate. We seek to inspire.

That is why we do not stand still, we reinvent ourselves, adapting to new challenges, exploring ever wider horizons.

Today we are launching a new brand and a new website. And we are happy.

In all this change, some things remain the same: our DNA has remained unchanged since day one. The genetic material that sustains all our dreams is the people, the team, the people.

This new brand and this new website are the reflejo of why we do what we do, of working on what we love, of doing it with the people we love. Reflege our Widergy Way to get things done. It expresses who we are.

We are Widergy. We are the future for utilities. We are the future for the community. And we are the future for every member of Widergy.

Welcome to a new Widergy. We welcome you to Widergy as always.

It doesn’t matter when you read this.

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Much of the corporate world is clear that they want to have a chatbot, the next question is: what for?

According to a study conducted by Mind Browser, 96% of businesses believe that chatbots are here to stay. This is aligned with Gartner’s vision, which posits that by 2019, 40% of companies will use chatbots to simplify their business processes through natural language interactions.

The main objective that companies pursue when implementing a chatbot is to allow their customers to interact in a natural and fluid way, as if they were interacting with another person. The vast majority of chatbots are integrated into channels such as a website, a mobile app or facebook messenger.

The first generation of chatbots was based on interactions that provide generic answers to frequently asked questions. Beyond the technological novelty, they have not yet managed to significantly improve the user experience or reduce operating costs in traditional channels (call center, sales office, etc.).

The immense potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning in general and cognitive engines in particular is clear. It is therefore essential to understand how to get the most out of chatbots as a customer service channel.

Welcome to the Second Generation chatbots

In the era of hyper-personalization, we understand that the evolution of chatbots is given by interactions tailored to each user, which in addition to understanding the context and answering general questions, incorporates answers to particular questions with the user’s own information. Some examples of this type of queries could be:

• What is my debt?
• I want a copy of my invoice
• What is the status of my application?

Some companies such as e-Bay or Freddo in Argentina are already exploring this potential to manage orders that are usually placed through the telephone or web channel.

For the new generation of Chatbots, their intelligence is not only based on interpreting what the user asks, but also on “conversing” with backoffice systems to obtain personalized data or to initiate a certain procedure.

With this approach we developed Utility GO! Agent, the module of our platform in charge of facilitating the interaction between Utilities and their customers. This module has pre-configured dialogs with questions that customers usually ask Utilities. It also has a set of services that integrate with the most common Utilities’ customer care platforms, facilitating the implementation of second-generation chatbots. These are key points as they increase the effectiveness of the channel, as well as reduce setup and initial training times.

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What does SaaS and Multi-tenant mean and what can they do for us?

Our Back end leader, Nacho, tells us how we implemented in Widergy the multi-tenant SaaS application platform as the basis for the products we offer to our customers. But first we need to clarify what we mean when we talk about multi-tenant SaaS applications, and more importantly what they can be used for.

The beginning

After almost 3 years of being involved in the development of software applications conceived as a product, I began to notice that the development patterns and technical solutions we were arriving at began to diverge more and more from the typical examples, tutorials and posts that had served me so well when I started this “journey”.

We created Widergy with the mission to think, design and develop technology solutions for the Utilities industry (companies that offer public services such as electricity, gas or water) in an increasingly dynamic, challenging and complex context.

The first product we set out to develop, so that we could then offer our potential customers, the utilities, was UtilityGO! An interactive digital platform that facilitates a new relationship between the consumer and the utility, evolving the user experience. In short, the main objective was for consumers to be able to interact with the utility across multiple digital channels while maintaining a consistent end-to-end experience, regardless of the channel. Understanding their consumption, paying a bill, carrying out a procedure or claim had to be a simple experience within the reach of anyone with access to a computer, tablet or smartphone.

This is when we first considered building a white label platform with a SaaS model.

SaaS: Software as a Service

Software as a service is a software distribution model in which a technology provider (us) offers a series of “services” in the cloud to its customers (the utilities), which are delivered to end users so that they can access them through a web browser or a mobile application developed for this purpose.

The provider is in charge of providing the service, taking care of the daily operation, maintenance, updating and evolution of the software, while the customer pays a fee for the use of one or more applications, as opposed to a classic model where the customer would have to bear the full cost of development and operation.

Software as a service often comes hand in hand with a feature that makes the model especially efficient: it is multi-tenancy.

Multi-tenancy applications

Imagine you want to create a web application and market it in such a way that multiple organizations can use it, how would you implement such a project? You could simply take the code base of your application and copy it completely for each organization, right?… but this implies that now you are going to have to support multiple instances of your application separately.

Clearly this is not the best solution, since in this case your development team would have to manage server infrastructure, upgrades or new functionality separately for each instance. If your application is being used by, say, a dozen organizations, and you want to deploy a new version, to update all the applications, your development team would have to do the same deployment a dozen times! There is a much better solution.

You can develop a multi-tenant application.

Multitenancy is a property that a software application may have that takes its name from the term “multi-tenant” (can be interpreted as “multi-organization”). It corresponds to a principle of software architecture in which a single instance of an application running on a server can serve multiple clients or organizations at the same time.

Multi-tenant software-as-a-service applications are extremely popular in 2019, but why? Basically, because they allow us to offer the same application to many customers at the same time, distributing the cost of infrastructure and maintenance among all of them. That is, an application that allows with a single instance and a single database, for example, to serve all customers at the same time.

The main idea is simple: to have a single code base that runs for all clients, with the same data structure, but implementing a mechanism that allows us to separate and isolate the data belonging to each of the organizations, in a way that is transparent to the client. That is, to look the same as any other single-tenant application.

The physical implementation of this concept has several possible approaches: The code base will be unique, but there may be only one physical copy running on a server, or it may be deployed on several servers running the same code in parallel. As for the data, they may be stored in a single database, or there may be a separate database for each customer, but all with an analogous structure.

The implications of this type of architecture are significant. Updating the code base means updating it for all customers at the same time; this has the great advantage that everyone shares in the improvements immediately, without the need for a complex phased implementation plan. At the same time, it has the problem of requiring a clear understanding of the effects that general changes may have on the particularities of each client. In terms of data structures, a great advantage of having unified structures, whether they are hosted in the same physical database or not, is the possibility of making aggregated queries on the data of all clients.

In terms of maintenance and updating processes, logically the structures must be modified at the same time as the code that uses them. This means that there is usually little or no downtime for the application in production, so these operations must be planned to have as little impact on performance as possible. If possible, it is best to implement “hot-deploy” mechanisms (as they are often called) which aim to have zero-downtime.

If you are serious about building horizontally scalable distributed systems, they definitely have to be multi-tenant.

If you were interested in this article and want to know more about how we implement these technologies, stay tuned to our social networks and we will let you know about the next ones!

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