July 9-10, 2013
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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

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.

Warren Buffet’s MidAmerican Energy to install wind power in Iowa — The company, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, plans to install 593 megawatts of wind power in Iowa, enough to power 190,000 homes, CNET reports.. The project will consist of 258 wind turbines supplied by Siemens Energy, to be installed throughout the state by the end of next year.

China defends cutting rare metal exports, boosting Molycorp stock — Rare metals are used in wind turbines and hybrid cars, so it’s bad news for both that prices for those metals have been soaring since this summer, when China slashed its exports by 40 percent. The country, which produces about 97 percent of the world’s metals for high-tech products, is defending its decision to the global community, which is calling the move a potential World Trade Organization violation, Reuters reports. On the other hand, U.S. rare earth mining company Molycorp’s stock is soaring, Earth2Tech notes. The company plans to start mining again in California next year and was also bolstered by a joint venture with Japanese mining firm Hitachi Metals.

India to quadruple renewable energy capacity – The country plans to reach the goal of 72,400 megawatts of power generation capacity from clean energy by 2022, the Wall Street Journal reports. India is expected to be the second-largest cause of global energy demand rising by 2035, with its consumption more than doubling by that time.

Verizon launches home monitoring and controls — The company announced a trial phase to become available in the first half of 2011. The service lets you lock doors remotely and set, adjust and control lights, smart thermostats and smart appliances using Fios, Verizon’s fiber-optic network.