BENEFFICE designed (eco-)system aims to reduce wasted electricity by incentivizing long-term consumption savings. It leverages Internet of Things enabled, low cost devices, which capture electricity use patterns at the level of clusters of devices and of each individual consumer. An energy behavior model correlates these patterns with optimal, personalized comfort levels and geographic and energy use contexts to determine optimal energy use behavior to reduce wastage of energy and to increase the use of renewable resources. Personalised, real-time motivational paths and challenges are contributing to deliver sustainable reductions of electricity consumption. Voluntarily engagement is achieved by the provision of monetary rewards -CO2 credits-in return of electricity savings and successful challenges. A novel ecosystem of like-minded actors of businesses who pay in CO2 credits and consumers who act for earning them is established.

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Life is information dancing through time, embedded in matter and shaped by natural selection. Few biologists or philosophers concerned with evolution would object to this description. This apparent accord could be taken to indicate universal agreement on the forces shaping evolution; but the devil is in the details and disagreement is apparent if one looks behind the curtain. The decade strong prevalent paradigm of the Modern Synthesis holds the position that evolution happens by random changes and natural selection acting on genomic inheritance. But there is a new kid on the block; the proponents of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis argue that inheritance is more than genomes and includes epigenetic information, niche constructs (ranging from the meerkats dens to humans railroads) and culture among other factors – and that these factors are both inheritance and a force shaping evolution. Here we introduce The Information Continuum Hypothesis of Evolution; a conceptual framework that focus on the inherited information rather than the diverse representations this inherited information may have (DNA, RNA, epigenetic markers, proteins, culture etc.). As a tool we introduce the concept “hereditome” to describe the combined inherited representations of information. We believe this framework may help bridge the apparent gap between the Modern Synthesis and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.