The Nest smart thermostat continues to get smarter with every software update.

Nest Labs announced the thermostat’s latest update today, which packs in several features that should make the sweltering summer heat more bearable. And as with all of Nest’s updates so far, the new features even work for the early adopters who picked up the first version of the thermostat.

Here’s a rundown of the new stuff:

Sunblock: This helps you avoid issues that may arise from direct sunlight hitting the Nest. Typically, this could lead to overcooling in the summer and underheating in the winter. Nest relies on its light sensor to tell when it’s in direct sunlight, and it adjusts its settings to compensate when the sun is beaming down. 

“Now you can basically put the Nest wherever you want with no worry,” said Maxime Veron, the head of Nest’s product marketing, in an interview with VentureBeat earlier this month.

Advanced Fan Control: Gives Nest owners more control over how their fans run. You could let your fan run throughout the night to bring in cool air or at intermittent times during the day to keep the air fresh.

Cool to Dry: A feature designed for extremely humid climates, this lets Nest optimize your air conditioner to keep your home from getting too humid. It’s more efficient than letting your AC run all day, and it could help you avoid pesky mold problems.

Intriguingly, the feature takes advantage of a humidity sensor that’s been in the Nest since day one. Before the sensor was just used to maintain comfort levels — now it’s powering an entirely new feature.

Nest’s “auto-away” functionality has also been improved, and updated mobile apps enable you to change the temperature with a mock scroll roll rather than just boring arrows. The new Nest software also adds Auto-Tune, which enables Nest owners to save money on their cooling costs under certain energy providers.

Nest’s smart thermostat is about to get a bit smarter — no hardware or software upgrades required.

Today, Nest announced that it has partnered with several power companies across the country — NRG Energy, National Grid, Austin Energy, and Southern California Edison — to offer a variety of energy- and money-saving plans for 90 million people.

“We’ve been saving people a lot of energy, but couldn’t we do more?,” said Maxime Veron, the head of product marketing at Nest, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Veron notes that Nest’s auto-scheduling features already saves its customers around 20 percent on energy costs — so it took aim at other ways it could help make energy usage more efficient as well as save people money.

First off, Nest has announced Rush Hour Rewards, a new service that will let the thermostat adjust the temperature in your home around peak energy use periods. So instead of blasting your AC at a peak time, Nest could cool your home beforehand. Or it could allow the temperature in your house to increase slightly when you’re not home.

Power companies already let their customers opt-in to similar programs today, but those involve giving up the control of your house’s temperature entirely without much feedback. With Nest, you can chart the Rush Hour Rewards on your smartphone, and you can always revert the temperature if you don’t like the way it’s being optimized.

According to Veron, Nest’s Rush Hour Rewards could save you 40 percent of your AC usage time. That’s a savings of about $20 to $60 per season.

Nest is also debuting a similar optimization feature for seasons, dubbed Seasonal Savings. Relying on what it’s learned about your home energy usage patterns, Nest can slowly decrease or increase the temperature of your home at the beginning of warm and cool seasons. Nest also takes your location into account, so it knows how to handle fall in New England versus fall in the Southwest.

The company says the minor Seasonal Savings changes could energy savings of 5 percent to 10 percent per season. That’s not much for one family, but across millions of Nest owners it’s certainly significant. Even better, the company says 80 percent of its Seasonal Savings customers stick with the optimized schedule.

Nest is also offering simpler rebates for energy companies to offer their customers. Unlike most other industries, energy companies (well, some) actually want their customers to be more efficient, since it makes the limited power grid much easier to manage. Rebates are one way to convince people to adopt high-tech thermostats like Nest, but they’ve traditionally involved lengthy paper forms and take weeks to issue a check.

The fix? Nest has worked together with National Grid in Massachusetts and Rhode Island to offer instant $100 rebates when you order one of its thermostats online. If successful (and I can’t imagine it won’t be), you can expect other energy companies to adopt this rebate eventually.

Nest is based in Palo Alto, Calif. Earlier this year, it was reportedly in the midst of raising $80 million in funding at an $800 million valuation.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Following strong momentum, smart thermostat startup Nest Labs has raised $80 million in new funding, with a valuation of $800 million, according to a GigaOM report.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Nest Labs attracted a lot of attention in 2012 and launched the second-generation of its smart thermostat back in October. That model is slimmer and offers compatibility with 95 percent of low-voltage heating and cooling systems in the U.S.

A Nest spokesperson told VentureBeat that “we don’t comment on funding,” so we only have GigaOM’s report to go on.

Google Ventures reportedly led the new round of funding, while Venrock participated as a new investor. In the past, Nest has raised “tens of millions” but hasn’t specified exactly how much. Previous investors include Kleiner Perkins, Generation Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Shasta Ventures.

Nest is apparently shipping 40,000 to 50,000 of its high-class thermostats per month, a figure that could reach 1 million per year if the company’s sales continue to rise. Most of Nest’s sizable growth is happening in Europe and the United States.

Nest photo via Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

After launching the incredibly polished Nest Learning Thermostat last year, you’d think there wasn’t much room for improvement from the team at Nest Labs. But you’d be wrong: Today, the company is unveiling the second generation Nest, which features a slimmer and more refined design, as well as compatibility with 95 percent of low-voltage heating and cooling systems in the U.S (up from 75 percent).

At first glance, the new Nest thermostat doesn’t look that much different from its predecessor, despite being 20 percent thinner. But upon closer examination, the additional polish becomes clearer: Now there’s only a single stainless steel ring between the front of the unit and the wall mount, instead of the split ring design from the original unit.

Under the hood, the Nest now has 10 wires to support more systems — the new unit adds support for two-stage cooling, three-stage heating, heat pump emergency heating, and whole home humidifier and dehumidifiers. As you can see in the images below, Nest Labs has also tweaked the wire orientation to be circular, which the company says will make it easier to install.

The new Nest is also sporting version 3.0 of the company’s software, which will be available to original Nest owners as a free update. With the new software, Nest is even more efficient and will customize its behavior to suit your heating and cooling system. For example, a new Early-On feature will make sure forced air systems begin early enough to reach your ideal temperature, and True Radiant capabilities make it easier to deal with notoriously complex radiant systems.

The thermostat’s Auto-Away feature, which lets the Nest tweak your heating and cooling when you leave the house, has also been radically improved. Now Nest can hit Auto-Away mode in as few as 30 minutes, and Nest’s software will also do a better job of learning your habits.

In addition to the existing Android phone and iOS apps, Nest has also released an Android tablet app. All of the mobile apps can give you more detail about specific heating events.

Overall, the updated Nest isn’t something existing Nest owners will need to rush out and get — but for everyone else who’s been eyeing the thermostat, it provides a tempting reason to get one. Maxime Veron, Nest’s head of product marketing, said the company’s goal isn’t to force existing users to upgrade. First-gen Nest owners can expect continued software upgrades for some time.

The second generation Nest thermostat is now available for pre-order for $249 on the company’s website. It will start shipping in the middle of October, and will be available in retail stores by the end of the month. To clear out old stock, Lowe’s (and possibly other retailers) will be reducing the price of the original Nest unit to $229.

It’s become a tired pattern these days: create an innovative product, then sit back and watch the patent lawsuits pile up. That’s what happened to the smart thermostat maker Nest, which wowed the world with its gorgeous web-connected device in October, but later faced a patent infringement lawsuit from Honeywell.

Today, Nest officially denied Honeywell’s claims (PDF filing), and made it clear it wasn’t going to let up without a fight. The company has brought on former Apple chief patent counsel Richard Lutton Jr. as a vice president and general counsel, who has been advising it for several months.

Nest Labs is no ordinary startup — it was founded by Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, two people who were instrumental in developing Apple’s iPod, and it has the investor backing of Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and other heavyweights. Fadell tells The Verge that investors are “totally behind us,” which means Nest is better equipped than most small companies to take on industry heavyweights like Honeywell.

“This lawsuit is a bald effort by Honeywell to inhibit competition from a promising new company and product in a field that Honeywell has dominated from decades,” Nest wrote in today’s court filing. “Instead of countering product innovation with its own new products, Honeywell has a track record of responding to innovation with lawsuits and overextended claims of intellectual property violations.”

Honeywell claims Nest is infringing on seven of its patents, but Nest refutes that in today’s filing. The company points out that many of the patents require a mechanical hardware like a potentiometer, which the Nest doesn’t have, and it says many of Honeywells patents are invalid since they were never disclosed to the Patent Office.

“We’d be more than happy to have a professional discussion with Honeywell to understand what their issues really are” Fadell tells the Verge, adding that Nest is open to multiple options “if there’s something that makes business sense to our investors, our employees, and our consumers.”

The Nest Learning Thermostat was plenty smart when it was first released five months ago, but even genius products sometimes need a bit of tutoring.

Today Nest users will receive the first major update for the thermostat, which will offer a more detailed Energy History, as well as a new feature called AirWave that can more intelligently cool homes. New Nest owners will also  have an easier time installing the device starting today as well, thanks to an improved backplate.

The Energy History upgrades will allow Nest users to learn more about how the system works, and ultimately use that information to save energy, Nest marketing lead Maxime Veron told VentureBeat in an interview.

Nest users have been able to see a simplified version of their usage for the past 7 days on the device, but now they’ll also be able to see a more detailed Energy History report that covers the past 10 days on the Nest iOS and Android apps, as well as on the web. The report will let you know how long your heating system was cooling or heating your home, and breaks down the activity with even more granularity if you click on a specific day.

For example, if you noticed that your air conditioning kicked in while you were away at work, you could tweak the system to avoid that. Veron tells me that a one degree change could mean up to 5 percent in energy savings.

AirWave, a completely new feature that can save users up to 30 percent in cooling costs, shows that Nest Labs isn’t slowing down innovation. With AirWave, Nest can cool your home to a target temperature without running air conditioning as much as traditional systems. The system can intelligently turn off cooling, but continue to run fans that push out cool air remaining in your vents and in the air conditioner’s coils.

Veron tells me that AirWave will work for half of its customers across the U.S. (some don’t have AC at all, and some live in climates that are too humid to effectively use the feature). He says that existing home cooling systems can also continue to run fans to spread out cooling, but they’re not nearly as smart as Nest, since they can only turn off the AC after your home reaches a target temperature.

As for the hardware changes, Veron says the company wanted to make the Nest’s already simple installation even easier. The new Nest back plate sports larger press connectors, so even fat-fingered novices can connect the thermostat. The company is also including new custom screws that can be installed onto a variety of surfaces without wall anchors.

The Nest mobile apps will also see some updates this morning. Both the iPhone and Android apps will allow users to remotely change away temperatures and will also sport new at a glance screens. Notably, Nest says that its Android has finally reached feature parity with the iPhone app.

Since I’m stuck in an apartment, I haven’t had the chance to try out the Nest for myself, but this latest round of updates is making me even more jealous of Nest users. Co-founded by some of the brains behind the iPod, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, Nest has seemingly done the impossible by making gadget hounds lust after a mere thermostat as much as an iPhone. But consumers aren’t the only ones paying attention, the company is currently facing a lawsuit from Honeywell, which claims that the smart thermostat violates its patents.

The Nest Learning Thermostat costs $249 and is available online and in Best Buy stores.

An intelligent thermostat seems like an odd project for the minds behind Apple’s iconic iPod, but in a strange way, the iPod folks may just be the perfect team to revolutionize home heating.

The project is the Nest Learning Thermostat, a Wi-Fi connected thermostat that learns your heating preferences and optimizes your home’s temperature to save energy. The brains behind it are Tony Fadell, former SVP of Apple’s iPod group, and Matt Rogers, former lead engineer of iPod software. The two are the founders of Nest Labs.

At first glance, the duo’s Apple heritage is plain to see in the Nest. The device’s design is simple and elegant, sporting a metal outer ring that lets you control the temperature (and which also resembles the original iPod’s mechanical click wheel), and an internal display that changes depending on what you’re trying to do. When it’s warming up your house, for example, it sports a nice toasty red. It also sports a leaf when you’re saving energy (usually by lowering the temperature).

But the Nest has brains as well as beauty. The thermostat learns your heating routine, and after about a week it will be able to automatically adjust your home’s temperature without much input on your part. “It never stops learning,” the company states (somewhat ominously) in its promotional video below.

The Nest is powered by six sensors that track things like the temperature (obviously), humidity, motion, and ambient light. The sensors allow the device to determine when you’re home, which makes it smarter than other thermostats that just rely on a time schedule. Multiple nests can also communicate with each other — so when you come home, your upstairs Nest could start to warm up your bedrooms.

Given the way the Nest optimizes your home’s temperature, the company says you could save around $173 a year in heating costs. With those figures, the Nest would more than pay for itself within a year-and-a-half.

Naturally, there’s also an iPhone app for the Nest that lets you remotely control the temperature and manage other settings. The company says an Android app is in the works. You can also manage all of your Nest devices online at the company’s website.

The Nest will cost $250 — much less than other smart thermostats on the market — and will be available in major retail stores like Best Buy. The company says you should be able to install it yourself in under 30 minutes, but the less tech-savvy may want to hire some help.