During a demonstration on Monday, Autodesk technical marketing manager Chico Membreno showed how designers and architects can quickly convert photos of an existing building into a 3-D model in Revit.

About 40 percent of energy use and greenhouse emissions come from buildings in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. And about 85 percent of the buildings that existing today will be around in 2050, Palmer said.

Autodesk, a company best known for its AutoCAD three-dimensional design software, has spent the past year developing extensions to its existing products focused on green renovations of existing commercial buildings, company executives said here on Monday.

“A lot of people use rules of thumb,” Membreno said. “This empowers the architect and gives them data to back up their design decisions.”

(Credit:
Autodesk)

The focus on renovation is partly driven by the downturn in the building industry but also a raft of building efficiency mandates coming from national or state governments, said Catherine Palmer, the marketing manager for Architecture, Engineering & Construction solutions at Autodesk.

The company has designed its sustainable analysis products for architects and building professionals and contractors working on new construction or renovations. But the tools could also be used to monitor whether green building investments measure up to expectations, which is often not the case. Energy-service companies, for example, need to quantify efficiency improvements to secure financing, said Palmer.

A screen shot from Ecotect, an application acquired by Autodesk that allows architects to measure and plan the environmental impact of design decisions. Based on an information model, the application here shows the heat gain inside a building from different sources, such as ventilation and the sun, during different times of the year.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

In Autodesk's lobby in Waltham, Mass, the company chose to display a number of projects, including printed three-dimensional models (on top) and a multi-layered map of a city that shows both buildings and underground infrastructure such as subways.

For example, a company could use Ecotect analysis to simulate how much electricity could be generated by solar panels or how much daylight is available for internal lighting. Green Building Studio can then analyze how those choice will impact the environmental performance with data such as projected energy costs and water use.

Autodesk executives declined to give a price for the software but a third-party review indicated that Revit Architecture’s suggested retail price was about $5,500.

Wanted: good building data

There are a number of examples of commercial buildings that have been retrofit to be more efficient. The Empire State Building, for example, did a $20 million conversion which is expected to lower energy consumption by 38 percent. Autodesk’s office here is a LEED-certified Platinum level building. Rather than tear down an existing structure, the company used the shell of existing building and remade the interior with a number of green-building features, such as light sensors, more sustainably produced materials, and the use natural daylight to cut down on artificial lighting.

WALTHAM, Mass.–Green buildings aren’t only for well heeled individuals and corporate headquarters. There’s an ocean of existing buildings ripe for an efficiency makeover.

Last year, Autodesk acquired two companies that had developed analytical tools intended to bring more hard numbers to sustainable design efforts. When used with Autodesk’s existing applications, professionals such as architects, designers, and contractors can get a snapshot of how existing buildings perform in terms of energy and water use and can simulate the impact of architectural changes.

That price and the training required means that individual homeowners are unlikely to use the software. But the commercial market is very large: Autodesk estimates that $400 billion a year will be spend on commercial renovations.

The challenge with these efficiency retrofit projects is that the tools to analyze the potential savings in energy, water, or materials are slow or inaccurate, according to Autodesk executives. A building owner may compile current energy use in a spreadsheet, for example, which is not connected to the building-management system or design software.

Green building retrofits are 5 percent to 9 percent of the commercial building marketplace now but are projected to grow to more than 20 percent in five years, according to a recent report from SmartMarket.

From there, an application called Ecotect Analysis allows an architect to input various data, such as weather patterns and available daylight, and to see the environmental impact of different design choices. That building model can then be imported into a hosted application, called Green Building Studio, which will tell the user how the building will perform in terms of energy use, carbon emissions, and water.

Autodesk now offers two add-on products to its Revit Architecture building-information modeling application to capture existing building data in a 3-D model and then simulate possible changes.

On Tuesday, Microsoft issued new tools to assist Microsoft ASP and ASP.NET technologies against recent Web-based attacks.

“These free tools offer detection and defense, as well as identify possible code which may be exploited by an attacker,” said Bill Sisk, security response communications manager for Microsoft.

The tools released Tuesday are designed to help Web developers mitigate against such attacks.

In April attackers went after Microsoft SQL sites by injecting malicious JavaScript onto legitimate sites. The JavaScript would direct a browser to a server hosting malicious software infecting the desktop with a variety of exploits. At the time Microsoft insisted it was not the result of a vulnerability, but lack of best practices on the sites themselves.

Touted by Republicans as a “compromise,” the bill, passed on a 293-129 vote, would not provide retroactive immunity, per se. It would, however, shift the debate behind closed doors, allowing U.S. district courts to dismiss lawsuits if there was written documentation that the White House asked a company to participate and assured it the surveillance was legal.

The major sticking point in the contentious rewrite of a 1978 electronic-surveillance law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was whether to grant so-called retroactive legal immunity to telephone companies being sued for their participation in the warrantless surveillance program secretly begun by President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks.

While expected to pass in the Senate next week, the White House-backed bill could have a harder time in that chamber, where a small minority is better able to block legislation from proceeding. Time is of the essence, as Congress nears a planned July 4th-week recess.

(Credit:
Google)

Google is starting to provide a fuller picture of the work it’s undertaking to create a practical tool for image searches.

On its Google Research blog Thursday, the company offered a brief introduction to VisualRank, a system that sorts out images by means of visual cues rather than by text associated with the images. The write-up is a distillation of a much longer paper (PDF), “PageRank for Product Image Search,” that two Google researchers presented last week at a conference in Beijing on Web technologies.

The VisualRank system is not yet live, and Google intimated that the image search technology would not become more widely available anytime soon. It did say that “in the coming months” it would offer more details on an “approach that has an easy integration with both text and visual clues.”

In its initial VisualRank efforts, Google’s research focused on product queries. That’s in part because product queries correspond well to the type of “image features” that were central to the study. In addition, the company said, those types of queries are “popular in actual usage” and users have strong expectations about the results they expect, which gave the researchers key examples to address.

Google's VisualRank algorithm sorts images by how similar they appear to an inferred original.

(Credit:
Google)

Google has also begun to broaden its initiative to take in other query types, including those related to travel.

As it moves forward, the search giant says it’s exploring three main directions:

First, estimating similarity measures for all of the images on the Web is computationally expensive; approximations or alternative computations are needed. Second, we hope to evaluate our approach with respect to the large number of recently proposed alternative clustering methods. Third, many variations of PageRank can be used in quite interesting ways for image search. For example, we can use some of these previously published methods to reintroduce, in a meaningful manner, the textual information that the VisualRank algorithm removed.

Over the years, image search has been a significant challenge for Google and others, like start-ups Polar Rose and Riya, with most of the progress being in a fairly limited set of facial recognition characteristics. Last year, for instance, the company said that its Google Image Search could tell the difference between a picture with a face in it and a picture that lacked a face, though it couldn’t distinguish between one face and another.

That sort of feature is increasingly common in digital cameras, which in some cases even recognize when a person is smiling or not. Camera makers are also working toward technology that knows who you photographed.

But recognizing a face or other object is a different order of business from delivering meaningful search results based on facial features or on object type.

Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, has opened a lab at Tsinghua University in Beijing to delve into a wide range of media search types, including still images, video, and music.

Dust off your college calculus, because Google's image rank (IR) formula involves eigenvectors and iterative matrix multiplication.

(Credit:
Google)

(Credit:
Veer)

This Type Tray acts as a barrier between a hot laptop and your legs, which is great because up until now I’ve always used a pillow to protect myself from tech-related burns.

Veer and Scribble Product Design configured the tray to allow heat to dissipate through its 3/4-inch layer of 100 percent industrial wool felt. The Type Tray also features an intricate typographic design laser-etched into the surface, courtesy of P22 Kilkenny and Cavetto. The product also does its part to help Mother Nature by only using recycled (and recyclable) materials.

The Type Tray is available here for $100.

Benchmark Capital's Bill Gurley: Hunker down

(Credit:
CNET News)

From a high level, this downturn is different from the Internet bubble of 1999. First, the last downturn started in our backyard. We were the speculators; this time it is someone else. This means that the “crash on the beach” wont be nearly as severe. In the Internet crash, many times the customer was actually another VC‐backed company and as such, there was a strong negative spiral. That said, while this downturn might be shallower than last, it could last longer in terms of absolute time. The American consumer is super-leveraged which wasn’t true before the 1930s or the 1970s. The overall economy will have trouble gaining momentum with this debt anchor, and my best guess is the contraction is not finished yet. As such, it might take a long, long time before we see glory days again.

Like every major shift in the environment, this one will offer opportunities as well as risks. JP Morgan was able to buy two great assets as substantial discounts with government assurances, precisely because they played the game frugally while others were more risk seeking. The real key is to have a keen understanding of the game on the field and to be the one that adjusts swiftly, rather than the one that moves after it’s become blatantly obvious to everyone else it’s time to move. Many companies that thrived post 2001‐2003 were simply “Last Man Standing” in their industry. It doesn’t sound all that glamorous, but it was the exact right strategy to deploy at the time.

(You can read the rest of his memo here.)

In the meantime, there’s no denying that hard times have arrived. This week saw layoffs at several high-profile tech start-ups, including Tesla Motors, Zillow, Adbrite, and Zivity, among others. I can’t find anybody who believes that it’s going to stop there.

Until recently, tech start-ups had successfully navigated through the shoals. It’s just that the storm now hitting the rest of the economy is starting to gust through the Web 2.0 world as well. But as Gurley correctly notes, this is the time to hunker down. Experience counts for something–and that’s something the survivors of the dot-com crash have in spades. Recall that when the Internet bubble burst, the average tech start-up was ill-prepared to deal with the bust. But anyone who survived that near-death encounter ought to know what to do now that the clouds again are gathering.

Earlier, I had a chance to sit down with Webware Editor in Chief Rafe Needleman, who covers the world of Web 2.0 start-ups as closely as anyone in the technology reporting realm. Check out the video we did together on the CNET News Daily Debrief.

Apple is strongly denying a rumor posted on CNN’s iReport page that Steve Jobs suffered a heart attack this morning. iReport is a citizen journalism section of CNN, where people can submit their own news stories. CNN has removed the post in question, but the report caused a sharp drop in Apple’s stock price before company representatives were able to deny the charge.

Also in this podcast, Windows XP gets another lifeline, a date has been set for the Large Hadron Collider to be turned on again, and we look at which gadgets at Ceatec might actually make it into the real world.

Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

Steve Fossett’s unfinished legacy: Deepest ocean exploration

Jobs heart attack rumor not true, Apple stock swings

Windows XP gets another lifeline

Skype: We didn’t know about security issues

Date set for restart of Large Hadron Collider

Gadgets go greener, thinner, and wireless at Ceatec

Sony’s ‘David Blaine’ starts 30 days of living in display window

Hands on with Sony’s new PRS-700 digital reader

Report: New HP smartphone aimed at consumers

What’s the big deal about WiMax?

One thing Penzu does a little better than other Web-based note takers is structure your docs like a diary, and stack each entry as its own page. You can hop back and forth between them with relative ease, and Penzu is smart enough to put the most-recently created docs on top. Also integrated are images, which you can upload from your computer at up to 5MB a pop. They’ll sit in the margin and out of the way of the text. A simple mouse-over will let you see them in full resolution.

Up until a week ago I would have found this little service to have a nice leg up on Google Docs, which I usually use to jot down notes when I’m in meetings or interviews with start-ups. In those situations I’m usually not in need of Google’s more advanced editing features, and want something that will simply retain my notes in case of hardware catastrophe.

However, if you’re looking for some really basic necessities like indentation, hyperlinks, and a way to search through your past work, you might want to stick with one of the more complex tools like Gdocs or Zoho Writer.

(Via Ehub)

Write simple journal or diary entries with Penzu. Whatever you jot down it will save in the cloud for later retrieval.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

(Credit:
Lifehacker)

OK. Don’t read past this first paragraph yet. I want you to look at the pic above and try to guess what’s going on. Go ahead. I’ll be here when you get back.

Figure it out? I didn’t. At first I thought it was some kind of “Internet-speak joke” that I’m not hip enough to get. Thankfully, it’s something much cooler.

By way of Lifehacker, I bring you the Spider-Mac desktop. Not its official name (not yet at least). Basically one of Lifehacker’s readers, Zack Shackleton took a Spider-man comic panel and made a useful desktop background out of it.

Using a number of diagnostic and editing tools including GeekTool and Magnifique, he pulled a bunch of info from his
Mac (like the time, a to-do list, calender, and CPU info) into an impressive dynamic package that displays this data as word balloons.

This makes for a fun desktop (albeit a confusing picture if you don’t know the context) for the Mac. Actually, the first thing I thought of when I saw this was the Get your War On comic and those G.I. Joe public service announcements from a few years back.

The Beatles’ film catalog is uneven all right, but as musical documents, they’re all pretty amazing. A Hard Days Night remains a light romp; the tunes come fast and furious, the Beatles are having a blast. Help hasn’t aged as well as a film, but the song sequences are still fantastic, Yellow Submarine is still trippy as all get out, Magical Mystery Tour is mostly awful cinema, redeemed with strong tunes. Let It Be has yet to make it to DVD, but even in the Beatles’ twilight, the magic was still there.

If you want to see the Stones at their peak, check out Gimme Shelter, a documentary film covering the last days of their 1969 tour. Scorsese’s high-speed editing of Shine A Light doesn’t help the film, it just fritters away the band’s true grit. Scorsese spends way too much time dishing out close ups of Jagger, and rarely covers the complete band. They’re mere backup musicians to the star. That’s sad, because the Rolling Stones, even now, are much greater than the sum of its members.