The Nest Learning Thermostat uses artificial intelligence to report when to turn down the heat and when to increase the air conditioner so that you don’t waste money. You can also communicate with the Nest Learning Thermostat using your mobile device.

Fadell thought of the the thermostat idea when he was building a green home in Tahoe. He was very involved in the design of the house and wanted it to be as beautiful as the products he worked on at Apple. When the architects showed him the option for thermostats, Fadell thought all of them were ugly.

“What was wrong with them?” said Fadell in an interview with Wired. “They were ugly. They were confusing. They were incredibly expensive. They didn’t have half the features you would expect for a modern thing. None of them were connected, so they didn’t talk to each other. I wasn’t able to remotely control them. In Tahoe, you want to be able check on the temperature of the house or turn it on before you get there. Because it’s really cold in the winter. I couldn’t do any of that, and I was like, Why is this?”

Thermostats had not changed much in many decades and the most popular thermostat was the Honeywell Round. The Round was designed by Henry Dreyfus in 1953.

“Thermostats are made by very large companies with no incentive to innovate,” said Fadell. “Their customers are contractors or HVAC [heating, ventilation, and air conditioning] wholesalers, not consumers. So why spend to make them better? It’s a good business.” Fadell estimated there are about 100 million homes in the U.S. and each one has between one and two thermostats, which means that there is about 150 million thermostats in homes out there. In commercial spaces, there is about another 100 million thermostats. And every year 10 million thermostats are sold in residential spaces.

One of the first engineers that Nest Labs hired was a cell phone engineer named Shige Honjo, a program manager for the iPhone. “Think of all the air conditioning that runs in empty houses — it wastes hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and that’s Alabama alone!” said Fadell when he was pitching another early employee named David Sloo.

Some of the investors in Nest includes Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Intertrust, and Generation Investment Management. Through Generation Investment, Al Gore is an investor in Nest Labs. Gore was inspired by a demo that Fadell gave at TED.

On August 3, Eric Schmidt stepped down from the Apple Inc. Board of Directors due to conflicts of interest. This Tuesday Apple’s Board of Directors will be meeting to discuss some of the possible replacements of Schmidt.  Schmidt had been an Apple Board member for about 3 years.

Some of the other board members include Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell, Avon Products CEO Andrea Jung, former Vice President of the United States Al Gore, Chrysler finance chief Jerome York, J. Crew CEO Millard Drexler, and Genentech Chairman Arthur Levinson.

It would not surprise me if Apple appoints someone highly involved in the Internet application or cloud computing space considering that Schmidt’s company is one of the best in that sector.

This humanitarian mission put former Vice President Al Gore and Clinton back to work together again.  Current TV was co-founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt.  President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton requested Bill Clinton to take on the mission.

This was the first time that Jong-il met with someone from the West since he had a stroke one year ago.  The release of the two Current TV reporters was a sign of North Korea’s “humanitarian and peace-loving policy” as reported by the Korean Central News Agency.

Clinton apologized for the behavior of the two detainees and expressed the current President’s gratitude.  The visit to North Korea came at a tense time as the country is ramping up a nuclear plan.

The President left at about 8:30AM local North Korean time on a private plane to L.A. with the journalists yesterday.  The women were sentenced with 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering the country at the time of their arrest.  The two women were doing a report on women and human trafficking.

When Hillary Clinton decided to take on the mission, she suggested sending several candidates to North Korea to lobby for the release of the two women.  Bill Clinton emerged as the preferred choice by the North Korean people and the government.  Clinton agreed to make the trip as long as the Obama administration did not object.  Mrs. Clinton is currently touring in Africa.

About two weeks ago, The North Korean Foreign Ministry disapproved of Mrs. Clinton’s remarks when she discussed their nuclear program.  The Ministry called her “a funny lady” and said that “sometimes she looks like a primary-school girl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.”

Euna Lee is a U.S. citizen that was born in South Korea.  And Laura Ling is the younger sister of Lisa Ling, who is a correspondent for CNN, Oprah, and National Geographic Explorer.

This was truly one of the most epic news stories I’ve written about and further proves how diplomacy can create freedom.

Pluripotent stem cells tend to be embryonic which is different from adult stem cells. Inducing embryonic stem cells to perform certain functions is crucial for the advancement of stem cell research as a whole, but anti-abortion activists believes that this is a violation of human life. Induced pluripotent stem cells are made from adult stem cells, but have embryonic pluripotent characteristics so this would enable researchers to further conduct studies while avoiding ethical issues with anti-abortionists.

“The partnership between these two leading organizations is a critical step in furthering this research and turning stem cell research into therapeutic realities sooner,” stated former Vice President and Kleiner Perkins partner Al Gore.

[via Biz Times]