Google buys Nest: Wow, just wow...

[ivaylo]

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/13/google-just-bought-connected-device-company-nest-for-3-2b-in-cash/

The Nest is not exactly a high school project but close to it. Or at least many of the forum members here can do this in their sleep. Or it must be the data collection aspect of it or something. But c'mon, $3.2B?

[rolandpenplotter]

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/13/google-just-bought-connected-device-company-nest-for-3-2b-in-cash/

The Nest is not exactly a high school project but close to it. Or at least many of the forum members here can do this in their sleep. Or it must be the data collection aspect of it or something. But c'mon, $3.2B?

Google think they can buy the earth, and will probably try to do so... but who'd they sell it to?

[alex870]

Hey Yahoo, I'll make you a fancy thermostat for just $1.6B - it's a bargain!

So apparently this is what the Googles needed control of the company for from Eric Schmidt.

[Rerouter]

it must be in preperation of there google house project, where all control of your appliances is routed through google (internet of things) and controlled via voice commands also fed through google (the NSA must really love donating to google)

[c4757p]

Google wants to have their slimy fingers in every corner of our lives. Don't let them...

(the NSA must really love donating to google)

If the NSA hasn't already acquired Google...

[nowlan]

That does sound ridiculous for a fuzzy logic thermostat. While I dont know their earnings, do they hold patents or something?

[GeoffS]

That does sound ridiculous for a fuzzy logic thermostat. While I dont know their earnings, do they hold patents or something?

Quite the opposite according to some as they are apparently being sued for patent infringement.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/13/google_buys_smart_home_device_builder_nest_for_32_beeelion_in_cash/

[JoannaK]

Google wants to have their slimy fingers in every corner of our lives. Don't let them...

(the NSA must really love donating to google)

If the NSA hasn't already acquired Google...

Want to bet, that next version of this thingy has camera, microphone and other neat extras. And of course wireless data (to Googleplex).

[EEVblog]

WTF, they meant $3.2M, right?

[retiredcaps]

I have seen this movie before.  Most tech companies justify the huge Billion dollar buyouts not for the product, but for the people.

Namely, "Nest Founders Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers will both join Google. Rogers was one of the first engineers on the iPhone team at Apple".

PS. The movie ends badly.  See 2000 March Tech Bubble Train Wreck.

[EEVblog]

PS. The movie ends badly.  See 2000 March Tech Bubble Train Wreck.

No kidding.
There is no possible way Google will make anything to close to getting their money back on this, by several orders. Hardly anyone gives a toss about a fancy intelligent thermostat, nor will they ever. Totally niche.

[AlfBaz]

Considering google had that electricity consumption thingy where smart meters could upload data onto google and you could then use their page to view your data, but then canned it, What's the deal with this then?

[zapta]

Namely, "Nest Founders Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers will both join Google. Rogers was one of the first engineers on the iPhone team at Apple".

That's explains it. The Nest has an Appl'ish touch.

Last year we replaced our old mechanical thermostat. We looked at the Nest, it seems very impressive from design perspective, but ended up buying a simple digital thermostat. It has a heat/off/cool slide switch and up/down temperature buttons. Didn't even need to read the manual.

[TerraHertz]

Maybe the idea is to require always-on internet video cams as part of your 'home security system', and have them visible in Google plus, before you can watch Youtube videos. Or something like that.

Joking.

At least I hope I am. That's either a 3 orders of magnitude typo in the price, or for some reason that tiny company is very important to Google's long range plan to most definitely do evil. And lots of it.

[codeboy2k]

The future will be much better if the home computer was going to be just that... a centalized HOME computer that ran all aspects of the digital house and only used the Internet for information retrieval and data display to the home owner when they are away.. However, sadly, it's not going in that direction..

"The Internet of Things" is a bad idea. The "Networking of Things" is good.  Internetworking? bad.  Every single appliance in your home will go back to Google (or some one else in the "cloud" for its intelligence, instead of going to your home's own main "brain" computer, and this opens up not only a stupid design to have 150 connections from appliances in your home to the outside world, but also a major security and privacy issue that no one can control and is just full of fatal flaws. We already know appliance manufacturers can't get this right. Designers put web servers and RPC services in their hardware so they can control it from a PC, or a cloud web page, or a smart phone, these are all well and good, but no one knows how to do it right, and because of that, this needs to come together under one control umbrella that can be auditted and secured.

[AlfBaz]

What's even worse, is the path these big players are going down with their locked down OS's where unless you "jail-break/root" your OS you are unable to even list the contents (dir, ls or what ever the similar command is in apple)  of the folder containing the apps running on your system.

So you have this wonderful scenario where your computing device is more connected than ever, with more things than ever and the least "open" OS ever

[iloveelectronics]

Google think they can buy the earth, and will probably try to do so... but who'd they sell it to?

Google already owns the earth. Google Earth that is

[ivaylo]

WTF, they meant $3.2M, right?

Weird stuff goes on in Silicon Valley. When Instagram went for a Billion (B) I thought that's nuts (no revenue, mediocre product, bunch of similar things out there)... Now after this I think that wasn't probably that bad.

If you look at Google's acquisitions you'll see more weirdness - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Google
Android - 64 times less valuable than Nest...
youtube - half the value of Nest
or may seem unrelated but my favorite is Slide (same thing, no revenue, no product) bought for $200M just to be shutdown and never heard of again...

Out of curiosity, how much do you think Nest would have raised on Kickstarter?

[EEVblog]

At least I hope I am. That's either a 3 orders of magnitude typo in the price, or for some reason that tiny company is very important to Google's long range plan to most definitely do evil. And lots of it.

For the life of I can't see what though, even if they wanted to do evil with it.
It's a bloody intelligent thermostat. What else do they have? I have not looked at Nest's supposed 100 patents though, but geeze, this price just doesn't make sense. 3 orders as you said.
It doesn't even make sense that a VC firm would have put $22M into this to begin with. Why?
It's almost as if it's some elaborate money laundering scheme or something, and everyone's in on it somehow.

[Bored@Work]

I am sure every thing is fine with that acquisition and the Google and Nest guys are fine upstanding gentlemen and ladies.

Would it be other companies, theoretically, of course theoretically only, I would have thought it sounds a lot like a company paying off organized crime by buying something at at much inflated price.

[EEVblog]

Out of curiosity, how much do you think Nest would have raised on Kickstarter?

At $230 a pop, even if they got say 5000 orders (realistic high side for such things), that's only just over $1M.
How many have they sold?
And I just don't get the smoke alarm, what a gimmick. $10 at your local hardware store does the trick just fine.

[EEVblog]

I won't mention the Altium acquisition of Morfik for 15% of the companies value - oops, I just did...

[Codemonkey]

As someone else mentioned, this is all likely part of their android@home project. According to one teardown I read, the Nest thermostat has an 802.15.4 radio in it running ZigBee, as well as the WiFi stuff, so its possible this could form the gateway in a network of low power wireless devices which I'm sure t they'll also be wanting to make. If they go down the same pathway as they did with android (make a reference design, let others license it), they could certainly recoup their investment in the long run as more home automation stuff takes off.

I think the biggest thing holding up much of the take-up of HA is the lack of a large organisation willing to develop something and then put it out there for others to use. Many of the existing players can provide some of the things you'd like to network, but not all and they don't always like to play nice with other companies products if at all. ZigBee goes some way to addressing this, its just a shame its not completely open. It would be nice if Google would just buy up the ZigBee folks and open the spec for use by anyone freely, I'm sure they could have got it for a lot less than what they just coughed up for a thermostat!

[daqq]

Well, it's a nice thingie, but 3 200 000 000 USD ? That's about a quarter of our whole countries state budget for the past year .

Now, I can see that google would be interested in such a device, but the price is an overkill by a few orders of magnitude. My guess is that the long term plan is a general purpose home device - a local wifi router integrated with a smoke/co2 alarm, or thermostat, or a light switch. It'll be great, because the 2.4 GHz band will become completely useless as even more things will start broadcasting on that range! In my flat I can already pick up 28 different networks.

[Rerouter]

yes spectrum congestion is a massive problem, and if they want an entire house in the long term goal automated with it, i am just not seeing how you could possibly manage it,

(nest wouldn't have owned a sliver of the broadcast spectrum by any chance?)