Today, Exceptional Innovation and Direct Energy unveiled a new Life|ware™ Energy Management Dashboard solution to help consumers reduce energy consumption and lower their energy costs. This partnership brings together technologies and data from power companies, broadband providers, and appliance companies to deliver the most extensive energy management solution available for consumers today. The solution is being showcased on ABD tru2way enabled set-top boxes in the Broadband Nation Exhibit and in the CableLabs’ CableNet 2009 booth at The Cable Show ’09 in Washington, DC.

The Life|ware Energy Management Dashboard demo is the first public demonstration of Exceptional Innovation’s new Life|ware 3.0 software platform. The Life|ware 3.0 platform provides new features and enhancements that make it even easier for Exceptional Innovation to quickly add support for new hardware devices and platforms and to build interactive software solutions like the new Energy Management Dashboard.

The intent of the new Life|ware 3.0 platform is to provide Life|ware dealers with even more powerful configuration tools so that they can create completely customized digital entertainment and automation solutions for their customers. For example, Life|ware’s new Visual Designer is a drag- and-drop screen design tool that provides a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) interface, allowing dealers to build custom user interfaces and applications in a fraction of the time required by today’s legacy UI design tools.

In addition to the fully-customizable user interface, Life|ware 3.0’s architecture allows the extension of Life|ware to new hardware platforms. The Life|ware 3.0 platform is based on advanced service-oriented application technologies that make it possible to render the Life|ware UI on a wide array of consumer devices, including tru2way-enabled televisions and set-top boxes, TiVo Series 3 DVRs, IPTV set-top boxes, cell phones, widget TVs, audio keypads, and touch panels,  in addition to Microsoft Windows operating system-based PC, consumer entertainment products, and Linux. The ability to run Life|ware on a greater variety of devices will provide Life|ware dealers with exciting new opportunities to deliver cost effective and compelling entertainment and control systems for their customers.

Life|ware 3.0 is the realization of Exceptional Innovation’s objectives to deliver open, hardware neutral, standards-based automation software. The Life|ware Energy Management Dashboard is an excellent example of how Life|ware’s 3.0 platform is working for dealers and consumers today and will be available with the release of Life|ware 3.0 this fall.