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?
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.
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.
You can determine a lot about locations looking at their usage. Targeted adds, plus it ads value to their smart phones.
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.
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.
How does this work then?
"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."
"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?
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).