The Brains Behind SmartMeter

Richard Yip, 42, talks about why and how he developed SmartMeter. And no, he's never worked for the PUB.

How did you come up with the idea?
My friend works in Sembcorp Industrial Parks. His customers had requested ways to keep track of their factories electricity consumption by taking regular readings. I was not involved in that project. With the current oil and electricity tariffs fluctuations, I believe people will be quite concerned about tracking utilities charges and hopefully save some cash at the same time. People will also like to have projections on usage and charges to help them in the monthly budgeting.

How long did it take to develop this app?
I was out of action with programming for awhile but with my deep development experience in C, C++ and Java, I picked-up Objective-C and iPhone programming from scratch. Everything about Objective-C, Xcode and iPhone is self-taught from various iPhone forums and Apple's iPhone developers resources. From concept to final launch, it took me about 9 months.

Approval from Apple was straightforward, only minor UI changes. Approval was one month from submission. I think that I followed their iPhone HCI quite closely and did extensive testing and debugging before submission.

The hardest part was probably sorting the logic for computing charges given tariffs and readings, especially for the two-tier rate for water.

Do you think the market is large enough to recover the cost by charging for the app?
I believe there are quite a few of meter apps around; but none specially tailored for the local or regional market. Most meter reading apps read the meter disc and calculate the consumption. Not many includes tariffs to compute consumption for the month to current or projected monthly consumption and charges.

The current features compare quite well with other meter reading apps. Also in the near future I will add features like backup, restore and maybe syncing of meter readings, tariffs and charges.

I will also like to add some sort of graph for showing projected, current and past charges and consumption.

In the description of your app, you talk about it being localized in Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. Can you elaborate?
These are planned features. I will do it because Singapore is a multi-cultural country with English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil as official languages. I am hoping this app will be widely used to help conserve energy and save money. It will also help to penetrate the Asian markets for meter reading; especially Malaysia, Indonesia, China and India.

What other apps do you have up your sleeve?
I've got some ideas floating, but nothing concrete. I'm also looking for interesting iPhone projects to do.