281–290 of 590 posts
Coming soon: audio ads, broadcast throughout your home via your Nest Protect. Since it knows if you're moving, it can wait and play the ad when it knows you're there, allowing Google to charge a higher cost per impression.
Am 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?
- Keyhole (now Google Maps)
- Android Inc.
- Motorola Mobility
- GrandCentral (now Google Voice)
- NeXT
- Siri
In general, an acquired company initially became successful by bringing value to consumers. When that company is acquired, it gets more resources to bring more value to customers.
Seriously not trying to troll, but could someone help explain where Google might see 3.2 billion dollars of value in a company that pretty much just sells a successful thermostat?
You can determine a lot about locations looking at their usage. Targeted adds, plus it ads value to their smart phones.
For once I can understand the pricing and think its in fact cheap. 1) Nest has a realistic potential to be in "every" home if not the actual hardware then the underlying intelligence. 2) Nest has a business model that works. People are paing for it and they love it. 3) Combining Google data with Nest access points I can only imagine the awesome things they can come up with and improve. Perhaps the first glimpse at an…
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I thought "Good for the Nest gu...HOLY CRAP GOOGLE PAID $3.2 BILLION FOR A THERMOSTAT COMPANY"
Considering they have revenue & a business model - it's more palatable than snapchat getting offered 3B by FB in cash & turning it down.
Oh come on this has to stop. How much would it have cost Google to build Nest from scratch? Not 3.2 billion dollars.
The team has to count for something here. It's not just a few geeks who built an app. It's guys with lots of experience building incredibly successful products. Google doesn't have a lot of experience in hardware design. Nest do.
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I doubt Google would shut down a $3,200,000,000.00 acquisition.
I'm not worried about a shutdown as much as I am worried about it going into maintenance mode like Google Voice.
But I have every expectation that this data, if not right away, could someday be sent to the criminal gangs that wear suits and ties that are looking for new targets to loot and plunder.
Just knowing the temperature in your house, cross-referenced with other data about you as well as electricity bills, could be enough for a future police agency to argue probable cause that you're running a drug growing operation and have them do all kinds of raids and intrusive searches and harassment.
This shouldn't be an issue, but Google has earned absolutely zero trust with its obvious non-denials of NSA activity and other negative conduct.
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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…
> You could get the same benefit from a device for $30 of electronics. … in theory but there's no evidence that most people actually see those benefits: http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/revis... I was going to say that you should start a company to produce that competitive $30 thermostat but then you confirmed that you have no idea what you're talking about: > The price doesn't justify the energ…
Not mathematically / thermodynamically possible, sorry. I live in a cooler area but not the real cold areas up north. During the recent polar vortex, which momentarily was centered over my house (and I'm not kidding) we got down to -15. (70 - -15) = delta t of 85 degrees. Lets say the magic machine dropped the temp by 5 degrees during the entire event 24x7 to save me energy. Why I'd pay $300 to simply permanently turn a thermostat down and leave it down is a mystery, but stick with me. That would mean a theoretical delta T of a "mere" 80 degrees. That means a maximum theoretical energy savings of (1-80/85)100 = 5%. Not 10%. No, I'm not setting my thermostat back 24x7. No, I don't live in a cold area like the folks up north where it was -30, in fact right now its somewhat above freezing outside. I just don't see it mathematically.
True, the weather is not always that bad. Right now its about 35. So 70-35 = 35 degree delta T, and dropping 5 degrees temporarily when unoccupied could save as much as (1-30/35)100 = 14 % if the weather was like this all the time and my house was perma-unoccupied. However, out of 168 hours in a week, my house is unoccupied for 18 hours. The rest of the time is filled by work at home, strange overlapping shifts, etc. So my house can only set back 10% of the time, so I only get 10% of the theoretical maximum savings, or a whopping .... 1%.
Unfortunately my heating bills over a very long term only average maybe $100/month, which I'm sure sounds insane to coasties, but we like it, keeps the riff raff away. So I can save about $1/month or $12/year. At $300 retail, it'll pay for itself by 2039.
Even worse, most will be purchased using a 30% interest rate credit card, making payback time infinite. The 30% interest on the credit card to pay for the $300 thermostat would be $90/year but I'm only saving at best $12/year. Whoops.
I would come out ahead both in comfort and financially by purchasing a kerosene heater and $300 of kerosene. Or better yet, even more insulation, or newer windows or whatever.
The final killer problem is I intentionally don't live in a McMansion so I can have a better lifestyle, such as not shivering in the winter. I've already decided to own a 25% smaller house to save 25% on my heating bills, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in saving 10% on my bill by shivering. I'm not paying thousands of dollars a month to shiver in a house when I could be warm and toasty in a hundreds of dollars a month apartment. Nope not happening non-starter totally uninterested. Selling snow to eskimos. Nope.