Nest Labs (www.nest.com) -- founded by Apple alums Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers -- has announced that the company is partnering with certain energy providers in the U.S. to offer more than 90 million people the opportunity to earn money and save even more this summer.

Together with NRG Energy, its subsidiaries Reliant and Green Mountain Energy, National Grid, Austin Energy and Southern California Edison, Nest is enabling instant rebates and exclusive offers for the Nest Learning Thermostat. It's also introducing new ways to save energy with Rush Hour Rewards and Seasonal Savings services.

Rush Hour Rewards helps people earn money or credits from their energy provider by using less energy when everyone else is using more. With Seasonal Savings, a Nest thermostat uses its knowledge of a customer’s schedule and preferences to gradually fine-tune the temperatures in the schedule to help save more energy. Both services...

TP-LINK has delivered a series of gigabit Ethernet switches targeted to businesses looking to upgrade their LAN. The Jetstream 24-Port and Jetstream 24-Port PoE, respectively.

They feature 4 Gigabit SFP slots. L2 Managed Switch allows an office infrastructure to provide Ethernet connection to computers. With the PoE functionality, the TL-SG3424P is an efficient and cost-effective choice for small business networks to work with wireless access points, surveillance cameras, VoIP phones and other PoE supported devices, according to the folks at TP-Link. It eliminates cable clutter by using the existing power lines to transfer both power and data.  

TP-LINK's answer to affordable green technology is its unmanaged switch (the TL-SG1008PE product, which is due later this quarter). With 8-ports and PoE technology it provides a way to expand a wired network by transferring power and data over a single Ethernet cable while consuming just 124W (up to 30W per port) For more info...

Two Canadian inventors and their company, Matterform, have launched a home 3D scanner for US$599 and exceeded their crowdfunding goals in the first three weeks of their campaign. Their scanner, the Photon, is designed to allow anyone to turn physical object into a digital 3D model on their computer, then print the file using a 3D printer or use it in 3D designs or animations.

"It works by shooting dual laser lines at an object as it rotates 360 degrees, taking pictures with a HD camera along the way, and using software to create a digital 3D model on your computer in as little as three minutes," says Drew Cox of Matterform. "Once the file is created, it can be modified, reproduced on a 3D printer to create copies of the original object, used in animations or 3D designs, or saved to keep a digital archive."

Launched via a 35-day crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, Matterform blasted through its initial fundraising goal of $81,000 in one week and has now raised over $...

Lorenzo Puleo has released DiapoSheet 1.0 for Mac OS X (10.6 or higher). It costs US$24.99 and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Photography category (http://tinyurl.com/crxsc7p).

DiapoSheet lets you lay out your photos with metadata-exif and get a contact sheet PDF file. Drag a folder containing images onto the DiapoSheet window and you are done. You can change the number of rows and columns, their gaps, the margins, the page size and format, add your custom logo and company description, your watermark, display the metadata-exif with your favorite font, color and label.

You can then export your document to PDF, TIFF, PNG, JPG at the resolution of your choice. You can select the resolution of the images even when exporting to PDF.

WD has announced a new 3.5-inch SAS hard drive solution for legacy datacenter storage systems with the release of the WD XE, 2.5-inch, 10,000 RPM SAS hard drive, now available mounted in a 3.5-inch WD performance adapter.

Shipping immediately, the WD XE hard drives provide best-in-class performance, low power consumption, and an easier upgrade path for existing 3.5-inch storage systems, according to Rich Rutledge, senior vice president of WD's datacenters business unit. While demand for 3.5-inch, high-performance enterprise-class hard drives slows, a need remains for an alternate high-performance storage device as a transitional solution for legacy systems, he adds.

The WD XE purportedly delivers 6Gb/s transfer rates and a sequential data rate of 204 MB/s. This 3.5-inch SAS drive delivers up to 67%lower power versus 3.5-inch 15,000 RPM drives.

The WD XE SAS enterprise hard drives in 3.5-inch performance adapters shipping in capacities ranging from 300GB to...

Chiaro Software has introduces Metropolis, a WordPress client for Mac OS X. It costs US$19.99 and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.

Metropolis comes with several features, like the possibility to edit posts and pages using a full featured WYSIWYG editor and/or a HTML editor with syntax coloring support. It also allows you to edit, approve and reply to comments. Other minor features include the possibility to create a custom preview template, offline support, full screen support and more.

New comments will appear on Mountain Lion's Notification Center. For older versions of Mac OS X, there's a new comment notification similar to Growl. Metropolis is also integrated to Twitter and TNT.fm. Users can see who tweeted the link to their blog posts and even generate random names from the results. Results can be saved for future reference.

You can download Metropolis at the Chiaro Software web site (...

A Motorola Mobility patent that was successfully used to force Apple to turn off its iCloud services in Germany last year could be invalid, the District Court in Mannheim, Germany, says, as reported "PC World: (http://tinyurl.com/c485tmv).

The court said it doubted the validity of Motorola's patent entitled "Multiple Pager Status Synchronization System and Method," also known as the push notification patent, in a lawsuit between Motorola and Microsoft. Google-owned Motorola alleged that several Windows Phone devices in Germany infringed on this patent. The court, however, decided to postpone a decision in the case pending a validity procedure about the patent in the German Federal Patent Court.

This is part of an ongoing battle. Apple has alleged that Motorola infringes 24 of its patents (21 of them with Android-based phones, the remaining three with set-top boxes and DVRs), while Motorola...

Ken Winograd and Space-Time Associates (http://www.winograd.com) has updated TinyBooks Pro, its Mac accounting and bookkeeping program, to version 8.0. The upgrade boasts enhanced professional multi-item invoice printing (B&W, grayscale or color), professional check printing, complete mileage support (business, charitable, and/or medical), enhanced interim form printing, extended transaction limits, monthly color coding, reconciliation checkmarks, and more.

TinyBooks Pro is a single-entry bookkeeping and accounting system designed for sole proprietors, home and other small businesses, and family finances. To use you enter your expenses and income, and TinyBooks Pro does the rest. Current and year-to-date on-the-fly totals are continually displayed. Fully automatic bar-charting of all expense and income accounts make the determination of monthly trends intuitively obvious, according to the folks at...

F.W.Roller & Associates has announced the availability of vmProcessStrobe 2013 Release 2 and vmProcessStrobeWeb 2013 Release 2. Together they enable viewing, stopping and running processes in VMware virtual machines using any smartphone or tablet with a web browser or any computer running Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux.

The latest releases support the entire VMware family of server and workstation products. Across a network of VMware hosts, vmProcessStrobe and vmProcessStrobeWeb can simultaneously stop or start an application or service/daemon in the selected virtual machines. The virtual machines themselves can also be simultaneously stopped and started. For visual reference, a strobe of screenshots of the selected virtual machines is presented and can be zoomed for greater clarity.

Visit http://fwRoller.com/Downloads to download vmProcessStrobe and vmProcessStrobeWeb. They may be run...

Graphic Node -- a graphic design company that specializes in creating themes, templates, and illustrations for Mac OS X -- has introduced another template product for Apple's Pages.

The new Template Mix for Pages 1.0 contains 45 sets of matching templates for brochures, invoices, and other business documents. Every set of Template Mix for Pages includes five different templates in matching styles that correspond with the category of each document: brochure, business card, envelope, invoice, and letter.

The designs range from traditional and formal to friendly and unconventional, says Jolita Unguvaitiene, general manager of Graphic Node. For instance, "the Green Leaf set will be great for environment-conscious organizations, Shadow Pattern will inspire artists in search of an unorthodox way to represent their creations, and Steel Cube exudes the confident outlook that will be great for entrepreneurs," he adds.

Users can view samples of the designs and purchase...

In an earnings call this week, Intel CEO Paul Otellini dismissed the idea that the company was making processors based on the ARM design, such as Apple's "A" series chips, reports "CNET" (http://tinyurl.com/btpkwus).

However, did seem to leave an opening for his successor, depending how you choose interpret his comments about the foundry business, the article adds.

"It would be great if we could form a strategic relationship with a customer so that it went beyond just a single foundry transaction," Otellini said. The CEO will be leaving Intel in about a month, so we'll see what his successor thinks on the matter.

Leadwerks Software has announced Leadwerks 3, their new development platform for building mobile games with native code. It's Mac and Windows compatible.

It's based on the technology developed for their game engine for the PC. Applications built with native code are optimized to work with each platform. Games written in C can be ported to Leadwerks 3 without having to rewrite them in a new programming language.

The Leadwerks 3 editor features tools for building game levels using a technique called constructive solid geometry. This streamlines the process of creating games, and makes it easier for artists to see what their games will look like as they build them, according to the folks at Leadwerks Software.

Leadwerks 3 uses automatic asset conversion. This means that images and objects can be reloaded on-the-fly, so an image can be modified in Photoshop and the result will show up in the editor right away.

AI [artificial intelligence] is supported out-...