Nest is acquiring Dropcam
nest.com
nest.com
[1] http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropcam/
[2] http://gigaom.com/2013/07/31/dropcam-gets-30m-for-expansion-...
Nest wasn't an acquihire or an assimilation, but was always stated as a separately operating organization. As such, it makes total sense that Nest acquisitions are held as being under Nest.
If HBO acquired a show or a studio, you don't say that Time Warner acquired it. If NBC acquires a property, you don't say that Comcast acquired it. These arms lengths subsidiaries are at arms length for good logistical reasons.
Further it's interesting how much a privacy concern people think Google is on HN, yet in normal life the amount of trust in Google is...actually shocking. I mean Google makes no bones about telling you, endlessly, how much they know about you. They don't hide it.
Interesting. We must hear from different companies. The Google I hear from only says they just know a few basic things like showing an interest in technology and possibly being a male. Google excessively downplays the amount of actual information they have access to via social connections, mobile device usage, search history, email contents, etc.
Only Google Now is entirely and absolutely built upon a pervasive trawling of everything you do, and users love them for it. It knows every location you regularly visit (categorizing them into locations like work and home), and will give you updated traffic and routing guidance. It knows every flight you take, package you have coming, sports team you ever searched up, things you've recently watched or searched, and on and on. If you have multiple devices, it happily and openly shares all of this data between devices.
They hardly downplay anything given that this is the entire foundation of an entire, front of market product.
> The next Nest product will be a home security system. If you already own Nest thermostats or smoke detectors, their motion sensors will do double-duty as security alarms.
I also wonder about the privacy policy question. Okay, so they won't share data with Google, but what are the restrictions of Nest employees to check out your cameras? At the very least, there are no technical limitations here and it's all a matter of policy.
Again, not intending to spread negativity but it would be interesting to see some discussion around these potential issues. Although I do hand over ridiculous amounts of private information to web companies (in reality, most of what's going on inside my head; there's plenty in my web-hosted diary that I've never told anyone), there is somewhere I would draw the line. And I think that line would go at uploading to the cloud what is going on inside my home, regardless of what the privacy policy says.
More than the business model though, Nest's goal seems to be to use sensor data and usage patterns to provide home automation with as little management as possible. Dropcam is essentially just another sensor - they're already doing things like recognizing people in the video feed. It's a way to get more data into nest's algorithms, and to get sensors into more areas of your home.
What do you guys think? http://www.cammy.com/
https://nest.com/press/nest-and-dropcam-sign-acquisition-agr...
$9.99 a month or $99 a year for a rolling 7 days of video. I guess most of that is a still, unattended image. Amazon cloud storage is cheap. It seems very expensive to me.
For example. My flatmate has a child. His ex-partner is prone to make stories in her head and go to the police with that. I'd be keen to host the kid until the father comes back from work, but I'm afraid of the ex-partner's accusations. I'm looking for a cloud storage service to store those hours for a few years, not to serve as legal proof, but to reassure the ex- that nothing weird happened. With Dropcam, that would cost me a few thousands dollars of storage per year, or am I mistaken?
Doing that 5pm Friday after market closes give everyone 2 days to process that information.
From the West Wing - http://politicaldictionary.com/words/friday-news-dump/
Donna: What’s take out the trash day?
Josh: Friday.
Donna: I mean, what is it?
Josh: Any stories we have to give the press that we’re not
wild about, we give all in a lump on Friday.
Donna: Why do you do it in a lump?
Josh: Instead of one at a time?
Donna: I’d think you’d want to spread them out.
Josh: They’ve got X column inches to fill, right? They’re
going to fill them no matter what.
Donna: Yes.
Josh: So if we give them one story, that story’s X column
inches.
Donna: And if we give them five stories …
Josh: They’re a fifth the size.
Donna: Why do you do it on Friday?
Josh: Because no one reads the paper on Saturday.
Donna: You guys are real populists, aren’t you?
Not too coincidentally, a lot of the SEC filings with really bad news seem to happen in the last minute of filing activity on Friday. (Not that this particular announcement is very material or bad news)
http://www.joystiq.com/2014/05/18/report-youtube-acquires-tw...
so apparently this is a thing that happens now.
But now. Billions of dollars later. Finally, Eric will always know who is screwing with his radiator.
“Our business model is very straightforward. I think if your business model is not straightforward, it veers into potentially being unethical, if you look at things that are quote-unquote ‘free.’ None of the people who work here want to work on something that works like that. They look at it as tricking the user, when [a company is] turning around and using some part of the user’s data to make revenue."
and
"He thinks the lavish perks at many technology companies, especially the free on-campus meals, are a disguised form of mind control, designed to get employees to work 12- or 14-hour days."
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/04/23/dropcam-ceos...
Looks like nothing will change about that straightforward business model.
This is a very different model than paying someone for a product. While you buy Nest's product, you are still the product (and selling you is a better business for them long-term).
Does the owner of the nest have the option to override such feature? Just because I have a nest in my home doesn't mean my home is well suited to kill the heating during peak times. Yeah it might save me a few quid and the energy company a bunch more killing my heating during peak times. But I am not going to sit in a cold house just because the energy company decide what is best for me. If I can override it or disable it. far enough. But that is like your ISP killing your connection because everyone in your street is watching netflix at the same time you are trying to just have a few good irc take rooms open at the same time.
In a pay per use case (which most net connections don't) we are used to pay what we use. If I need my house heated because I am cold, I want to be able to heat my home.
this is to avoid brownouts. If I recall, the same does no happen in the UK other than everyone making a cuppa at a break in coronation st. (o;
From what I can gather from tweets by participating customers, they do it because it's cool and exciting not because of the financial rewards.
[1] http://support.nest.com/article/What-is-Rush-Hour-Rewards
http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/01/13/nest-gives...
"Nest founder and CEO Tony Fadell told Forbes last month that his company had struck deals with close to 20 utility companies, who paid Nest $30 to $50 per thermostat annually, to manage the energy usage of Nest customers who had opted into their utility’s demand-response program.
As part of the program, Nest temporarily take over the healing and cooling of a homes for a set period, perhaps a few hours, and customers are notified that an “event” is set to happen some time beforehand. When Nest does this over multiple homes in a neighborhood or county it can, Fadell claimed, lower energy costs for utilities by 50%, by re-routing peak energy being used in empty homes.
“We know how many people are home during those times,” he said “We know which homes have cooling, we can go through the data and we can say we believe we’re a five megawatt power generator or 10 megawatts in this county. That’s what we can deliver – 50-60% of the energy that was consumed in that window has been shifted away.”
The services makes Nest a middle man for utility companies, meaning that Google itself will now play a role in managing energy efficiency programs across wide swathes of home and even counties – something that Google has been keen to do for some time."
This is pretty much why I wouldn't buy a Nest. I don't need a 3rd party knowing when I'm not home.
That is, assuming you know the schedule of my automated lights and can accurately guess if I'm home or not with blackout curtains over my windows :P
Even my neighbors don't know when I'm home half the time.
I'm an odd duck.
When demand exceeds supply, brown-outs occur which means a lot of unhappy customers and, considering utilities' monopoly status, calls for investigations.
Here in northern California, our utility (PG&E) is experimenting with "peak day" pricing. During peak hours of certain days, electricity costs increase by ~10x. In return we enjoy a lower baseline rate the rest of the year, encouraging us to shift consumption to off-peak hours. It's a great idea for everyone involved.
(It's true that my free Google lunch keeps me at work around lunch time, but I don't feel pressure for me to work beyond the 38 hours a week they pay me for. In fact, Google has a lot of programs to help its employees maintain a good work/life balance. Of course there are crunch times, but I feel free to spend less time working at other times to balance it out.)
I think even in the U.S., it's only really in the Valley (and maybe also in NYC finance) where a regular salaried job has wild week-to-week variations in working hours. Occasional variations, yes, but in most industries it's expected that you'll work standard hours most of the time (e.g. 8-5, M-F), deviating only when there is some major issue. Every engineering company I've heard of works like that, for example. The main exception is that people do do quite a bit of email outside of work hours.
There are all sorts of practicalities that rely on a predictable work schedule: scheduling your carpool, arranging childcare dropoff/pickup, etc. How does that work in the tech industry? Do people at Google not have carpools, kids, etc.?
Is there actually honestly anyone out there who doesn't think so? I mean, is it really disguised even? We give you stuff, you make your life revolve around the company. It's a very straightforward exchange in my opinion.
Hell, people have directly said to me in interviews "We want this company to be all you think about" when explaining why they'd prefer to hire me full-time rather than part-time.
On the one hand, you want to provide perks that offset personal cost to your employees AND reduce the amount of time it takes for them to do something like lunch with the result in increased productivity (ostensibly simply due to removing factors such as travel-time-to-lunch-place).
The company store comes to mid, as well.
There are many great benefits that companies do provide: free commute costs (bus, bike and ferry service) as well as on-site food...
Perhaps a way to quash any misgivings about such services would be to provide a daily per diem for services as pay, where you get the per diem pay UNLESS you partake of the companies service instead.
So you badge into each service and thus get that per-diem pay redacted from your check.
If you use NONE of the company's services, then you get that same portion of pay back.
This also has its problems, though.
----
What I would far prefer, though, is tech services system that companies can buy into:
Want your employees to be able to bus from SF to MTN VIEW: pay in and let them badge into that service.
Why should all the tech giants run separate services that are basically all the same routes? Let a company run that, and let ANY company add users and pay based on badging.
Let companies have a "groupon" of sorts for restaurants in their area, where the per-diem lunch allowance is spendable at any restaurant within a radius of the office. The employee will get a % of their meal paid for by the company, and they pay for anything they personally want over the base?
Allow for perks that are not walled to the campus/office/etc.
Heck, Path.com employees had a monthly Uber allowance they could spend...
This should be encouraged in Silicon Valley, to allow startups to share services at a discount which both provides revenue, data, testing, users, validation, etc....
Yes, it does make things incredibly convenient. No doubt about that.
But what about just doing it the way it's done in Europe? Where employers are required by law to be paid X amount per month for lunch, X amount of transit, and so on. Company gives you the money, you spend the money whichever way you feel.
I'm not against perks, I'm against hiding them behind some feel-good crap about how much free stuff you get. It's not free, it's part of your paycheck. And it's cheaper for companies than just paying you more, to boot.
I also like the idea of just having a conveniently located lunch place (internal or external business entity, doesn't really matter) that employees go to and pay for stuff with money. It can even be cheaper than going outside because said business has a guaranteed customer base.
Guess that's along the lines of your "allowance" idea. But even less wishy-washy.
PS: when you think about it, it's really kind of funny how all these perks and stuff that magnificent Silicon Valley companies offer their employees, are taken for granted in Europe because they've been there since workers' rights movements
That's called a "salary". The only difference between those subsidies (as we call them here in the European country I live) and regular salary is for tax purposes.
PS: when you think about it, it's really kind of funny how all these perks and stuff that magnificent Silicon Valley companies offer their employees, are taken for granted in Europe because they've been there since workers' rights movements
Europe's a big place. We certainly don't have on-site daycares, healthy food by a good chef, life insurance, concierge service, rental cars, gyms, buses with Wi-Fi and such. The only perk I can see is the maternity leave, which has a similar duration (120 days) but doesn't have gender discrimination, and probably the vacations.
Google doesn't actually run the bus themselves; it's Bauer.
(I hate the SV culture of having sensitive meetings in public cafes and restaurants, especially ones frequented by all your most likely competitors! Internal compartmentalization is also a bad extreme, but having a hard "insider vs. outsider" boundary, and then specific short-term projects with their own borders, and all communications about those happening in secure spaces, is my default.)
SHARED BUSSES!?!?? Wtf! Do we want tech employees sharing ideas and getting poached?!?! What is this communist Russia???
Another source of daily irony is I dislike open plan offices in general as a developer; I'm now more a product manager (although I do tech stuff as well, and conference papers, and such), which is a role which does strongly benefit from open plan, and I've also we've built monitorhenge at a pod of desks in open-plan, out of Seiki 39" 4K and portrait-mode 24" U2410 monitors. It's essentially a re-creation of my favorite work environment; a private office shared with a small team.
For restaurants, this exists in Europe. Your employer gives you a monthly number (around 20) of $10 vouchers that are accepted as cash only by restaurants (though there was a small black market for them). One that I saw in France is called http://www.groupe-cheque-dejeuner.com/en.html
One of my employers reimbursed my work-from-home expenses (ISP, extra landline, printer and toner), and I get to deduct my home office expenses from my income for taxation purposes (percentage of my habitation costs, proportional to the percentage of my office floor space).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_miners#Company_...
Creepy.
Haha.
That's cute.
Right now, I'm working on a TC article and some conference talks on independent research. I'll probably drive home once the traffic is done. I'll go to my co-presenter's house Saturday night to work on the talks again.
The "work vs. personal" distinction is really secondary to me, compared to "stuff I want to do, vs. stuff I'm forced to do"; work-related projects are just as often "want to" as home projects are "forced to".
WTF is wrong with people!?! I'd work my butt off at a place that provides thrice-a-day healthy, delicious, diverse, vegetarian (for me) meals, on-site gym and sleeping pods!! Hell, I'd have surely done that when I was a decade younger! I hate cooking and it is ridiculously expensive to buy food with my dietary constraints in the open market. Especially food that is not only delicious but also healthy in the long term.
Why is there this utterly misguided hatred against "company food"?
Even after breaking down my yearly compensation to an hourly rate, I bet there will be a marginal difference in the money the company makes by keeping me working the extra hours and the price I'd pay for buying such food everyday (remember, I hate to cook).
Plus, nobody forces you to eat that food, if you really prefer cooking your own food or buying it from elsewhere, keep doing that.
I really feel that good, healthy food is an awesome incentive and stigmatizing it reeks of a bloody first world problem.
> Even after breaking down my yearly compensation to an hourly rate, I bet there will be a marginal difference in the money the company makes by keeping me working the extra hours and the price I'd pay for buying such food everyday
Any company providing you multiple meals per day for free is getting the better end of the bargain. Make no mistake about it. It's an arbitrage between the cost of cooking labor + cooking material vs. your labor.
In other words, you're getting the short end of the stick. People do not value perks rationally. If they did, they would deny every last one of them.
How many people value anything rationally? Ever?
As humans we are programmed to be pain averse. I hate foraging for and/or cooking my food. I consider it an utter waste of my time and breath. Yes, I care about my health, but don't have the money to pay an arm and a leg for a personal chef, or even plan meals. In short, I want to eat well (tasty+healthy), but without any direct effort on my part. That is the pain I am averse to. If a company can remove that pain, for me it is a fair exchange, even if in a most superficial manner.
Give and Take. Plus, no exchange in life is perfectly equivalent. Is it?
Fully realized, you could have all the benefits offered (selfishly) by your employing corporation instead provided by an employee's union co-op. Even the building. The corporation would just be thin pipe keeping labor flowing in one direction and money flowing in the other.
There was a company, a big one, that I forget the name of that was run like that through the second half of the 20th century, but I can't remember the name :(
So you admit you are getting a bad deal?
>I hate foraging
Have you EVER foraged in your life?
>I want to eat well (tasty+healthy), but without any direct effort on my part.
If you are talking about the meals that Google provides, there is no evidence that their food is any more healthy than alternatives.
Personally, quite the opposite actually, if you read my full comment.
Have you EVER foraged in your life?
You mean, by the dictionary definition of foraging? In the wild? Then, No. But, if you mean gathering edible items that are uncooked or semi-cooked, to be cooked for creating a meal, then, Yes. And I consider it an utter waste of time. So, what's your point?
As for the nutrition value of Google meals, perhaps you know more than I do? Are you a (ex)Googler? I'd wait to hear from some current Google employees to get the truth on this point, rather than rush to judgement.
I'm sure there are as many folks with your motivations and inclinations as there are with mine.
The deal "provide me a decent meal and I'll stay at work another hour or so" is, evaluated rationally, completely 100% fine by me. I'd rather stay at work for an hour than take an hour out of my day to cook & clean, or spend the equivalent of an hour's wage on feeding myself.
I am genuinely curious because I hear that argument thrown around a lot, anytime non-monetary compensation is being discussed among the HN crowd.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aapl+goog+msft+facebook
Look for revenue/employee.
If you strip out just the developers at a big company which is very profitable and product focused, you'll get even more insane revenue-per-employee figures.
It's depressing/unpolitic to say, but the "free meals, shuttles, etc." are intended for the developers, management, and other highly-in-demand people. It's probably overall worse for corporate culture to set up multiple tiers of employees, some of whom don't qualify for those perks, but a company with huge numbers of easily-recruited, low-value-add employees (e.g. walmart) tends to have crappy perks; a company with a small number of key employees with absurd productivity and profitability per employee (hedge fund?) tends to have amazing perks.
(That startups tend toward binary outcomes based on the productivity of the first 5-10 people is probably not in dispute here, I assume and hope.)
I don't know about you, but my salary (plus benefits) rate is about $95-100 / hr.
So, let's say I 'work my butt off' for an extra 4-6 hours a day. That is an extra $3000 of unpaid work, per week, that the company gets for giving me food. Or, $200 per meal.
(That's not even taking into account the considerable extra value that the company gets in owning the results of my work.)
Aside from that quibble, look at it from both sides:
The company spends a few hundred dollars a week on meals and gets 5-10x return on that money. Everybody agrees this is a good deal for the company.
The employee trades a few hours of his life for food. The hours he works, he would not have received any money for anyway unless he was working another paying job. The employee is trading "opportunity costs" (imaginary value) and receiving substantial value in "free" food.
If the "opportunity cost" of those extra work hours are sitting in front of Netflix watching zombie movies, he probably got a good deal trading that time for food. If the "opportunity cost" is starting the next hot startup, he got a bad deal.
Most would say the above is harmless and it benefits the company, which benefits the employee, so why is it such a bad thing? It's bad because this type of culture makes it extra easy for engineers to burn out.
I can't agree with this, and I have some experience with both sides of it.
I have worked at a company that does not provide much of anything in the way of perks (Amazon) and a company which is known for them (Google). I've NEVER felt pressured to put in more hours at Google, while at Amazon it was more or less a constant of existence.
As with all anecdotes, your mileage may vary, but I think it has little to do with the perks and more to do with broader company culture. At Amazon, the lack of perks and long hours become badges of honor that you share with your peers. Looking back on it, it feels rather toxic.