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Comment by yoda_sl | Hacker News Reader

The acquisition price is apparently around $191M USD (€170M):

  http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/nokia-withings-acquisition-news/

I am overall happy with Withings products: wifi scale, step counter and blood pressure. My hope is that Nokia will be doing a better job with the acquisition than how they kept up with smartphones.

The purchase price seems to be on the low end; Withings do have a lot of personal customers info related to health and activities so I was thinking an acquisition price will be higher.

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My hope is that Nokia will be doing a better job with the acquisition than how they kept up with smartphones.

When I look at the corporate history of Nokia and see that they used to be in industries completely unrelated to electronics, let alone mobile phones, I have this tiny inkling of hope that they still know how to make big pivots. That's probably simplifying their corporate history too much, but the point is that Nokia wasn't even always a phone company. Things can change.

For a few interesting examples, they still sell Nokia rubber boots in Finland. They also made ammunition for Finnish assault rifles: https://imgur.com/8wUNGcB

There was recently an article which revealed some of Nokia's plans to keep on developing 5G networks. Seemingly the idea is to integrate this technology to many of its new IoT devices: http://www.image.fi/image-lehti/uusi-nokia-on-uusi-nokia (in Finnish)

My concern is if Nokia or someone else drops the ball and the online accounts are deactivated that all these cool products become nearly useless. I very much depend on my Withings scale to automate my weight measurements on a daily basis.

Time to start hacking! https://poppopret.org/2013/06/10/summercon-2013-hacking-the-...

I also have a Withings scale. There is a "Download" link on the website in the data table tab. It gives a CSV file of all the records for the current user. Good time to back it up locally, just in case.

(I wish all cloud based services would have this type of export facility).

A local backup is fine for your history, but if the server get shut down it's not a 'connected scale' going forward now, is it? I'll be bummed if ours stops sync'ing at some point.

I made one using a Wii Balance Board that's pretty handy:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/your-weight-online/

I'm optimistic. In a way, Nokia at its height commanded an industry of networked, "dumb" but highly complex electronic devices. They just couldn't keep up when their industry got disrupted by pocketable computers with complete GUIs.

The good IoT devices of the future won't be refrigerators with LCDs running Android grafted to them, they'll be more akin to smart interfaces electronic devices. If I’m right, the future of Nokia could be surprising.

$191M and Google got Nest for a billion. Nokia got a good deal there

Or Nest was over valued, which I think is more likely. Buggy thermostats and smoke detectors aren't worth a billion.

The smoke detectors suck, but the thermostats are amazing.

Right, they're worth THREE billion.

Nest was $3.2B (https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2014/0113.html) not "just" a (1) billion.

Mass amounts of historic personal health info is more of a liability than an asset depending on the jurisdiction and the litigiousness of your customers in case of a breach.

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