ReadWriteWeb

Microsoft has announced that over 40 new features will be added to Silverlight 5, which will be available in the first half of 2011. The announcement came at today's Silverlight Firestarter event. You can watch the keynote here. New features announced include: support for running Silverlight applications with desktop features in the browser, text enhancements, a GPU accelerated 3-D API and more.

Peter Troast, founder of Energy Circle, a company that sells energy-saving products, has created a new energy-monitoring system that sends his home's energy usage stats to Twitter. Inspired by the open source power monitoring kit from Tweet-a-Watt, Troast's system also sends his home's energy data to the web, but it's not in the form of once-a-day tweets like Tweet-a-Watt provides. Instead, his system uses a monitoring device called TED (The Energy Dectective) to create charts which are annotated by family members then tweeted for everyone to see. If you want to do the same for your home, we've got the info.