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?
Google's core competency: know everything. Look at anything Google does from that perspective.
Each Nest will feed data (anonymized, of course /cough/) back to Google so they'll know home heating patterns, heck, home usage patterns (it watches activity and proactively & predictively adjusts for when people are/aren't around). Feed vast amounts of that data into the cumulatively large (no adjective does it justice) data mining process and they'll know that much more about [m|b]illions of people & locations.
US$3.2B? In the USA alone that works out to $0.003 per person per day over 10 years (assuming everyone has a Nest device in the long run; optimistic calculation, but sets the ballpark values).
Would seem to me that if you wanted to simply get at the product designers you could do that for less than 3.2b. The designers are good but they aren't that good. And throw enough money at people and loyalty goes out the window.
I work for a company that does power monitoring on a circuit by circuit level for homes and small businesses. Once you get your device on the internet 24/7 you can get into the automation business pretty quickly.
You can determine a lot about locations looking at their usage. Targeted adds, plus it ads value to their smart phones.
Nest knows if you're hot. If you're cold. When you've set it to turn off because you're at work. It knows if you're energy conscious or cost sensitive. Etc. There's a ton of behavior in there, making it far more than a thermostat you buy at Home Depot.
Smart Grid tech has still yet to make the splash it's capable of. Google has been investing in many alternative energy production projects worldwide. To accurately predict and shape grid demand you'd need a bunch of sensors in the homes, quite like Nest products. I can see it being part of their planned foray into energy projects.
Google has a long history of paying to acquire talent. I assume this isn't any different. Nest made an extremely popular in-home device; Google wants to buy that mojo.
This price should be worth a system instead of a product or a series of products. If they can create a complete system for home management, that will make more sense.
Not yet, but bear in mind that "microcontroller thermostat" is not a new concept, nor are "connected thermostats", "connected blinds", or "connected lights".
Nest is in a unique position as basically the only player out of many who have successfully made home automation devices that people actually want, and don't look like they came out of a backyard plastic mould cast in the late 60s.
Search around for home automation solutions - the hardware is universally clunky, the software atrocious. Only the most dedicated of DIY geeks need apply (or people who can pay contractors to make the ugliness go away).
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 overrides instead of actively turning it on or off. Though of course many people eventually just end up setting it to a static temperature.
There is no amazing in-house intelligence gathering platform here.
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?
Conveniently enough, they sell a device to help with that. "In addition, the Nest Protect activity sensors improve the Auto-Away feature of your Nest Thermostat." (Nest Protect is their smoke detector.)
Yes. I'm not a huge fan of the product in general or the financial deal BUT I will say this aspect of the product is genius in that you want an auxiliary sensor aka the smoke detector right where people spend most of their time, bedrooms and offices and such. There are serious problems with the overall situation, but no sarcasm, the specific situation of this product pairing is a work of genius. I don't think that one idea makes up for the other problems, but credit it due them for this.
"Auto-Away saves energy by reducing heating and cooling in empty homes. Instead of having to turn the thermostat down every time you leave the house (and back up when you return), the Nest Learning Thermostat turns itself down automatically when it senses that you’re away."
Nest has a motion sensor, which appears to be a passive infrared light sensor. It's behind the grill hidden in the bottom 1/4 of the device below the screen. It uses this for the Auto-Away feature for example.
The next and obvious step for Nest is home security devices. They clearly have a fairly capable design team, and have already achieved surprising namespace for home electronic devices.
Google does not base their future on ads. They deal in technology and connectivity, and the automation of the home entirely fits within that vision.
