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Introducing Wattvision
Fortunately, the geniuses of Silicon Valley have us covered. Last month, Wattvision, a start-up from the Y Combinator incubator, began shipping the Wattvision Energy Sensor. The Sensor is a wi-fi enabled, user-friendly device that monitors your energy meter and provides real-time data on your energy use with updates coming every 10 seconds. And, quite importantly, sells for under $260, a not-so-unreasonable sum in today’s tech market.

The Wattvision comes in two parts: a sensor that fits over your electricity meter (you literally strap it right over the housing of the meter); and a “gateway” that pushed the data to your personal WattVision web page, iPhone or Android device. Using the device you can literally run around the house, turn out lights and see your energy usage dropping every ten seconds.

More importantly, you can monitor your long-term usage and find peek times of energy use. Got the heat blasting in the middle of the day when you’re at work? Wattvision will see the peak. Is your dishwasher sucking more energy than you thought – you’ll know that too. By having this data literally at your fingertips, you’ll be able to smooth out the peaks, save money and help reduce CO2 emissions.

Keeping up with the Joneses
In addition to giving you your own WattVision dashboard, the company has a rankings page that allows you to see how other households are doing and compare your scores. It also pushes your data to the Google PowerMeter system which provides more data and community interactions.

For the truly geeked-out, WattVision has published an API, so if this catches on we should soon see all sorts of great applications coming out of the programming community for the device.

This holiday season you can either get your tech-savvy loved one an Xbox Kinect or a device that will help them manage the energy their Xbox is sucking up every day.

Things are looking great for Savraj, founder of Wattvision, which I'm proud to say is a Das Kapital Capital portfolio company. Grab a device for yourself (or a loved one) and let me know what you think!

This dude is right on. Follow this advice. And let me also throw in the suggestion of opening with a cute animal photo because it instantly warms any audience up.

Jason’s original concept of a new dashboard interface for navigating the Khan Academy’s exercises has come to life (you’ll need an account).

My “Addition 1” skills are improving.

“Why did you do this?”

Since we started preparing to test out the Khan Academy’s exercises inside a couple forward-thinking schools, we knew we needed an interface that clearly shows students which exercises they should be working on and where progress has been made.

We also wanted to make the whole experience a bit more fun.

So cool! Found on HackerNews, submitted by my friend, Joel Spolsky.

This would be a pretty fantastic day at the United Nations.

This is from a company in my Das Kapital Capital portfolio.

Way to go, Blue Frog Gaming, it looks like you've got another hit on your hands! Just in time for Thanksgiving -- showing grandma how an iPad works.

Now I just need to learn how to play Hearts...

I should thank you - I found out about it right when I was searching for a multi-city return ticket. I had already checked the usual Kayak, Expedia, etc (not orbitz though, didn't know about that one). Anyway, you saved me about $500, so thank you!

I love reading feedback like this - especially when it's from a redditor!

Few Afghans in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, Taliban strongholds where fighting remains fiercest, know why foreign troops are in Afghanistan, says the "Afghanistan Transition: Missing Variables" report to be released later on Friday.

The report by The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) policy think-tank showed 92 percent of 1,000 Afghan men surveyed in Helmand and Kandahar know nothing of the hijacked airliner attacks on U.S. targets in 2001.

As an astute redditor (trollbearisbestbear) points out, "we'd better get Rudy Giuliani over there ASAP."