• Since Google started hyping up its home energy management tool, PowerMeter, people have started to get really excited about having the ability to personally control their energy consumption.  Even further, companies are developing ways in which consumers can manage their energy when they’re not even in their house.  Here are 6 iPhone energy management  apps in development or currently available that you should definitely check out.

1. Tendril Vantage Mobile:  Based out of Boulder, CO, the company’s already brought in $30 million in funding.  Although the app won’t be available until 2010, the company is promising to offer real-time consumption stats and the ability to remotely control your appliances and thermostat.
2. Energy UFO: Developed by Palo Alto based company, Visible Energy, the Energy UFO is already free on the app store.  Visible Energy produces energy management gadgets and power strips upon which the Energy UFO interfaces with.  Unfortunately, the app isn’t of much use yet considering their hardware won’t start shipping until Christmas this year.
3. Ecobee’s Smart Thermostat:  Ecobee, out of Toronto, already developed a thermostat that communicates through WiFi.  The company is planning to launch an iPhone app allowing consumers to remotely turn their thermostats up and down.
4. My House UI: Developed by digital home startup, Control4, the My House UI app allows users to control heat, lighting, and air conditioning.  The iPhone app, however, is useless unless you own Control4’s in-home devices.  The company’s already raised $17.3 million.
5. Meter Readings, MeterRead, and Wattulator : All three are $0.99 apps allowing consumers to manually enter electricity, water, and gas data.  Although they don’t directly communicate with your system at home, they’re good for finding out how much energy specific appliances in your home are using.

• More firings at Google this week. Keep an eye out for downsizing in the Ad sales force as next quarter earnings round the corner. Here’s what Google had to say today…

As we made clear during our last quarterly earnings call in October, Google is still hiring but at a reduced rate. Given the state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people focused on hiring.

Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions.

We know this change will be very difficult for the people concerned, and we hope that many of them will be able to find new roles at Google. They helped build this company, new hire by new hire, and we are enormously grateful for everything they have done.

• This thing looks great, if it weren’t for my pre-x-mas iPhone drop….sucks

• Ernst & Young just released their analysis of Greentech Investment in the US, Europe, China, and Israel made by VC firms through Q3 2009.
• They report cleantech investments being stronger than ever, bringing in a $4.6 Billion over the first three quarters of 2008.  That’s an 82% percent increase in cleantech related investments from the year before.  US is dominating the pack, contributing 3.3 of the 4.6.  However, like I wrote a week ago, they believe investments will slow substantially in 2009 due to economic conditions.
• According to a report released last week, a National Venture Capital Association survey has shown that although VC investment will slow in 2009, greentech will receive more venture capital than any other sector.
• Despite the economy, impressive green/cleantech announcements continue to come out like this.  Even recently, First Solar announced a huge milestone in the solar sector.  Lots of sustainability hope to come in 2009, are you excited?

• If you have Windows and the latest version of Google Desktop, I highly suggest getting your hands on (not really) the new Gmail desktop gadget. Your email now lives on your desktop without needing the browser open.
• You can star messages, use the same keyboard shortcuts, and have access to all of your contacts.
• Can’t find it anywhere on your desktop? Just tap the [shift] key twice to bring it back. Very nice Google.

• Google Reader can now automatically translate feeds into multiple languages, allowing you to keep up to date on content from around the globe.
• Translations are done with Google Translate technology and aren’t 100% perfect, but readable.
• This started as a Google Reader team member’s personal project, utilizing Google’s policy allowing team members to work on personal projects 20% of the time.

Can anyone recommend some good foreign blogs?

VentureBeat

• Type a keyword into Spy and it will return posts containing the keyword from Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, Yahoo News, Blogs and Google Reader over a past time period (30 minutes, 12 hrs etc).
• Spy displays posts in reverse chronological order, which can be a bit deceiving at first, tricking you into thinking you’re seeing new posts every few seconds when in fact the posts are going back in time.
• Spy is a Google App Engine application.

• Usernamecheck.com will show you all the sites that your preferred username is available  or taken on. 
• If you plan on joining any of these sites in the future and want to keep your username the same, you’d better hop to it. 
• We heard around the block that some people are having accuracy problems with he service, so beware. 

• Are you happy or sad about this?

Gmail Blog, Maximum PC all, Search Engine Land, VentureBeat, PC World, InformationWeek, Valleywag, Search Engine Roundtable, TECH.BLORGE.com, WebProNews, Lifehacker, RotorBlog.com, Asiajin and Digital Inspiration

• Sobees enables web sites and services to work on the desktop.
• Their main focus is to allow you to have separate ‘browser’ like windows running on your desktop, with picture, video and search capabilities included.
• Also, straight on my desktop I can view activity updates from friends on my social networks, as well as update my own status on Facebook and Twitter.
• The best feature being the social updates on the desktop that are updating in real-time. The desktop experience selling point will be far too difficult to gain market share, especially when [apple] [n] on my Firefox gets me a new window and back to my online homepage instantly.

TC

• ScreenToaster records a video of what is happening on your computer. Such a great tool for web site demos, QA testing, FAQ sections and more.

TC

• Meganova BV has developed an iPhone App called Nameo to facilitate easy contact sharing between iPhones in close proximity.
• The convenience of wireless contact sharing will cost your new business associate $2.99 on the App Store.
• As Jason commented

“Really well executed and a smart idea. However until this software is ubiquitous amongst many kinds of smart phones and can work at an enteprise worthy level will we see this as a business card replacement.”

TC

• JS-Kit, develops widgets that increase user interaction on your site or blog with one snippet of code.
• They are focused around comments (ratings, search), ratings, reviews, polls, popular content stickies and more.
• They claim to already have 45,000 publishers utilizing their services.
• They announced today they have raised $3.6 million in a Series B funding round led by Altos Ventures, and existing investor TEF3.

TC

• Wix, revealed today that it raised a $3.5 million series B round From Mangrove Capital Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.
• They are a flash web editor that enables anyone to create a beautiful website or widget without any knowledge of programming.
• This news comes after their strong growth in the last couple months, surprassing the 200,000 users mark and nearly 20M pageviews a month across their network of sites using Wix’s technology.
• Wix makes money off of monthly subscriptions from users who want to get rid of the Wix logo or want the site to load under their own domain.
• They also has some very nice people running their company.

TC

• Eyealike uses image recognition to process and target advertisements. They previously used their algorithm to pair faces of singles with their counterpart.
• The processor, which is currently being scaled to include company logos, vehicle recognition, and beyond, is currently able to discern age, gender, hair and skin color.
• If you’re anxious to check the accuracy for yourself, sorry, Eyealike’s 90% accurate algorithm is only available for evaluation by gullible enterprise executives in carefully controlled business presentations.

Assuming Eyealike works as they claim, how long until Google acquires or releases its own Google Recognize? TC