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Chicago-based Clean Urban Energy has raised $7 million in Series A funding, the company announced today.

The company has developed a software platform, and the monitoring and analytic services to go with it, that take advantage of a building's thermal mass and thermal-energy storage (TES) to make it run more efficiently and save on energy costs.

Clean Urban Energy says its software analytics platform can reduce the expense of a building's heating, ventilation, and air conditioning energy use by 15 percent to 30 percent.

"By aggregating and optimizing the thermal storage properties of multiple buildings, CUE unlocks … Read more

The latest build for Windows 8, known as Build 7989, has leaked onto the Web, reportedly revealing a batch of potential new features.

Windows has long offered a virtual keyboard. But with Windows 8 destined for tablets and other mobile devices, Microsoft has reportedly revamped the keyboard with a new look and feel. Unlike the current keyboard, which requires mouse clicks to operate, the new keyboard will offer touch friendly buttons along with a split keyboard option, according to WinRumors, which has posted a video demo of the new virtual keyboard.

The Win 8 keyboard will reportedly provide built-in support … Read more

Zeta Communities broke ground yesterday on a net-zero housing development in Stockton, Calif., the company announced.

The housing community, which will consist of 22 units, is being developed by the nonprofit group Visionary Home Builders of California.

Zeta Communities is known for its affordable, green prefab homes that are constructed using sustainable or recyclable materials at its factory in Sacramento, Calif. Building 90 percent of a home in the factory will cut construction time by 70 percent, according to Zeta.

In the case of the so-called Tierra del Sol community planned for Stockton, the Zeta prefab homes will be 1,… Read more

Windows 8 is scheduled to launch in fall 2012, according to hints dropped by one of the company's corporate vice presidents.

Speaking last week at an event at Microsoft's campus in Mountain View, Calif., Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft corporate vice president for Strategic and Emerging Business Development, laid out the likely scenario for Windows 8, from initial beta to final release, according to TechRadar and other sources.

Asking people to look into the crystal ball and assume that "what happened in the past is a reasonable indicator of what our forward looking timelines will be and just … Read more

Barely a day goes by that some company doesn't pitch me on its mobile application developer tools. It shows just how hot the market has become.

I'm not a programmer, but when I got the announcement that iBuildApp now supports Android as well as iOS, I thought I'd dabble a bit. The sales pitch is that anybody can create an app with their tools for free, after all. The company asserts that 10,000 people have already used it.

Not every app is necessarily great, though, and unfortunately, I found iBuildApp's tool unsatisfying. It was workable … Read more

To IBM, buildings are just another source of data its computers can crunch and make sense of.

The computing giant today at an event in New York is unveiling its Intelligent Building Management software, which collects and analyzes information to improve energy efficiency and maintenance. It's part of IBM's smarter planet initiative to use technology and its business consulting group to tackle big social problems.

Many commercial buildings are already have building management systems that use sensors to communicate information with a central computer. For example, heating and cooling equipment and offices can monitor temperature, humidity, light levels, … Read more

Please keep in mind that this post is based off of a beta version of iOS 5. Apple can (and often does) change the behavior of features before the latest OS hits consumers hands. If anything drastically changes in regards to this feature in iOS 5, we will be sure to update the post.

When Apple announced a new Notification Center with iOS 5, it also revealed that iOS 5 would come with a couple of widgets: weather and stocks. The widgets are active in the Notification Center, the same place you will find the rest of your app alerts on iOS 5.

iOS 5 has been released to developers, packed with 200 features new to the popular mobile platform. One of the features not discussed during the keynote was Shortcuts. Shortcuts allows you to make your own AutoText corrections for common phrases. We will show you how easy it is to use Shortcuts. Follow along!

… Read more

Efficient Software's personal organizer comes in several versions, including freeware editions that offer most of the functionality but fewer features than the full versions. There are also versions optimized for men and women, Efficient Lady's Organizer Free and Efficient Man's Organizer Free. It's the same program, except that the ladies' version is decorated with pink hearts while the men's version is skinned in bolder, starker tones. Sure, it'd be easy to joke about gendered software, but at least there's a choice that doesn't involve a default theme that looks more like a … Read more

Efficient Address Book Free Portable is a name that nicely sums up this application, a portable freeware version of an efficient standalone e-mail contacts manager. It's a full-featured address book that you can carry around with you on a USB keychain drive or other portable storage media or device and access from any Windows PC. It can also run at start-up and in multiple instances, too.

We extracted the compressed download and saved it to our portable apps folder. Efficient Address Book Free Portable will run from anywhere in Windows and from pretty much anything Windows can access, too, … Read more