Woohoo, I look forward to it disheartening into Mountain View and only being used to control the HVAC at HQ and be shown off to board members on their quarterly tours.
Google to Acquire Nest
151–160 of 590 posts
Re: Google to Acquire Nest
#152Wow. This weekend I was talking about Nest with my dad and I said Google will end up buying them. Interesting to see that it's an all cash transaction. I guess all cash makes the deal cheaper for Google.
Re: Google to Acquire Nest
#153Am I the only one who thought "well, good for the Nest guys" followed by "too bad, it looked like a good product"?
I'm trying to think of a tech acquisition that was favorable, or at the very least not unfavorable for the consumer. It seems like tech (maybe all ) acquisitions almost always favor the buyer and not the consumer. Does anybody have any good examples?
Android, Inc., also acquired by Google, seemed to work out well for the consumer, I would say.
Re: Google to Acquire Nest
#154Am I the only one who thought "well, good for the Nest guys" followed by "too bad, it looked like a good product"?
Yeah, motorola products have completely gone down the toilet after that acquisition. They were so great before with fast updates and a wonderful skin of android, and now they're either non-innovative or way too overpriced for the value.
You're being sarcastic right? Sorry if it's a dumb question.
Re: Google to Acquire Nest
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I the only one that doesn't get chills up their spine whenever Google breaks into some new market? I see very little possible misuse of temperature preference (of all things...) and very great possible gains. The more intimately a service knows you, the more personalized and relevant data it can bring. And another thing, I am really sick and tired of tempering or being told to temper my enthusiasm for some new tec…
After the whole PRISM/NSA/GCHQ scandal I think there were two roads to take: make your internet life as secure and private as possible (I tried this, it was boring and probably futile) or realise that keeping information private is only going to get more and more difficult. If you come to the latter realisation as I eventually did things like this might excite you. The more info Google has on me the more exciting and…
Instead of giving up altogether, I suggest a different approach: choose your enemies and compartmentalize your personal data.
Stuff related to your personal life and your feelings? You probably can't keep it from the NSA, but you can keep some of it from Google and Facebook. Super secret work stuff (think airplane parts, not stealth mobile app startups)? Cryptography and all kinds of misdirection to throw off spies.
When Google knows a lot about me, it knows what cuisines I like, so when I search for "restaurant" it can return search results for restaurants I might like... except I could have searched for " restaurant in " and the results would be good enough.
Current returns are too marginal and my own judgement is often better; future hypothetical returns may be matched by improvements that don't require so many privacy invasions — specialized search engines, for instance.
Re: Google to Acquire Nest
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have paying customers. It matters.
Helen of Troy which owns Kaz, which owns Honeywell (one of the largest businesses specific to Nest's thermostat space) has a market cap of $1.7bil - http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=HELE - that's why this sounds crazy. On the flip side, P&G is a $217bil business - so, not that crazy how big the market is and can be. EDIT: As larrys points out, Honeywell is a $70bil biz.
Sounded odd to me so I checked it out.
HoT only appears to have the rights to certain Honeywell products and not the thermostats:
http://www.kaz.com/kaz/honeywell/
Edit: "Honeywell" that you are referring to has a market cap of almost 70 billion:
Re: Google to Acquire Nest
#157Am I the only one who thought "well, good for the Nest guys" followed by "too bad, it looked like a good product"?
Really? $200 for a predictive thermostat, with a lame excuse to stream energy usage data and proximity data (Nest detects humans) out of your home? Id rather pay $99 to tell health insurance companies how often I exercise, live. You could get the same benefit from a device for $30 of electronics. It's an overpriced gimmick to justify another selling off of your personal data forever in exchange for nothing but some m…
The price makes me choke as well. But I think Nest's real value is as a market distruptor, the evidence being Honeywell's lawsuit and furious attempts to update their own products with comparable features.
Re: Google to Acquire Nest
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
They monitor for presence. Combine the phone's attempt at geolocation with motion detectors or whatever to make even finer grained geolocation. So if your phone geolocates to the frozen north, and the thermostat indicates the furnace is working extra hard, expect to see warm vacation destination ads in your desktop web browser at work, or something like that.
Do you think Google doesn't already know who is in the "frozen North"? How could knowing how long your furnace runs add any value, at all, for you as an advertising target, if we must always go with that utterly simplistic analysis? Further people keep repeatedly claiming that the Nest device has some sort of presence detection. To my knowledge it has no such thing -- it simply allows you to program it by daily overr…
Cut and paste from the nest website:
"Activity sensors
Nest’s activity sensors have a 150° wide-angle view. That range enables Nest to activate Auto-Away in 90% of homes."
Don't know if its just a 0-D light level sensor or a PIR motion detector or a camera. But it does have a 150 degree FoV which vaguely implied optics.
It has certain architectural implications, my thermostat is on a lightly traveled inside hallway between sleeping and living quarters, so I'll never be able to use a nest; it would consider the house unoccupied pretty much all the time other than bedtime and wakeup time. I guess there are people with thermostats installed in their kitchen and/or living room and/or home office?
Re: Google to Acquire Nest
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parking outside your house requires that they have enough interest in you to dedicate resources to the task. The electric/gas meter in your house is not literally designed to detect when there is a human home and when there is not.
Nest really isn't great for that either, aside from what I'd call an adaptive timer based on how you adjust it. But if you have access to someone's live power usage, you probably have a good idea of their schedule. On top of that, your phone makes a much better tracker than your thermostat.
> Nest really isn't great for that either, aside from what I'd call an adaptive timer based on how you adjust it.
What about the auto-away feature?
Re: Google to Acquire Nest
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I see very little possible misuse of temperature preference (of all things...) and very great possible gains. That's where the problem lies: the greatest gains should come from features/sensors/products not yet introduced. Of course temperature preference is a very weak data point for privacy, but I can think of a few invasive things a future device could have. I don't know if that's actually possible with a device…
It would make it really easy for the DEA to figure out who the home pot growers are. Yeah you can look at utility bills in isolation but that generates a lot of false positives: people might just like to keep their house cold or warm (depending on the climate). But once you correlate house size (via the property appraiser's website, public records) with house temperate (which the NSA gets from Google and supplies to…
...although many high-volume operations that are based inside of residential properties tend to use illegal/'off the grid' (so to speak) electrical connections...