Monnit has announced a big improvement in the performance of its Alta wireless devices, which are targeted at the commercial real estate sector. The new version of its firmware, v10.22, claims a 20% increase in battery life – allowing a device to last 12.5 years on two standard AA batteries, when sending data on 10-minute intervals. This is a big step up for the hardware specialist, as the cost involved in replacing a battery is one of the most burdensome issues that a customer has to face. In a building of thousands of devices, short battery lives would necessitate a specialist team to replace all those batteries. But 12.5-years is long enough for the device to be thought of as…