Nest, the Google-owned company known for its smart thermostat, announced today that it’s acquiring home automation hub Revolv.
Though details of the deal were undisclosed, Google’s Nest is acquiring the company in order to bring its team into the fold and will no longer sell its product. “Revolv will not be made available to new customers,” Revolv’s website says.
Revolv’s flagship product, a bright red home automation hub, serves as a connecting station for various smart home products such as the Sonos speaker family, Philips Hue lightbulbs, WeMo light switches, and more.
Today, the Google-owned purveyor of smart thermostats and smoke alarms announced that it is adding several “whole-home” automation systems to its “Works with Nest” developer program.
The systems — Control4, Creston, Remote Technologies Incorporated (RTI), and URC — offer various kinds of controls for home and businesses. Nest also works with Dropcam, maker of a home video surveillance system. In June, Nest bought Dropcam for $555 million.
Nest today announced the first major software update for the Protect and its accompanying app, which brings with it a slew of helpful new features (and some familiar features to owners of Nest’s smart thermostat).
So what’s changed? First off, the Nest app will finally show you a 10-day history of alarms from the Protect, which could be useful for pinpointing specific issues. You can also see the specific carbon monoxide level that triggers a CO alarm, which could let you know if you have a slight CO leak or something far worse.
We’ve been told that an Internet of Things (IoT) is coming, and our salt shakers will soon be speaking to our light bulbs. But how? There’s no decided way for all of these devices to talk to one another.
Google today debuted the Nest smart thermostat developer API with launch partners Mercedes-Benz, Jawbone, IFTTT, Logitech, LIFX, and Whirlpool.
Nest announced plans to debut a developer program last year. At that time, Nest senior product manager Greg Hu stressed that Nest always intended to offer a developer program but said it wasn’t a priority early on.
Google’s $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs in January put the Internet of things on the map. Everyone had vaguely understood that connecting everyday objects to the Internet could be a big deal. Here was an eye-popping price tag to prove it.
Nest, founded by former Apple engineers in 2010, had managed to turn the humble thermostat into a slick, Internet-connected gadget. By this year, Nest was selling 100,000 of them a month, according to an estimate by Morgan Stanley.
Nest CEO Tony Fadell has just issued a notice recommending users disable the Protect smoke alarm’s ’wave to dismiss’ feature. In testing, it was discovered that people could accidentally trigger the dismiss feature, delaying a smoke alarm.
Sales of the Nest Protect have also been halted.
He recommends that users disable the feature for now, and says Nest is going to update units that will allow the feature to work correctly. In addition, if your Nest Protect is connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi, it will have the feature disabled automatically.
Until the feature has been corrected, users can tap the button on the unit to silence alarms.
Earlier this month, as Google was snatching up the smart-thermostat maker Nest for $3.2 billion, a lesser known home sensor company made its own announcement. SNUPI Technologies, a Seattle startup, said it had garnered $7.5 million in funding. That might be pocket change compared to the Nest deal, but it was a significant endorsement just ahead of SNUPI’s first product launch: a low-power wireless sensor network called WallyHome that tracks humidity, water leaks, and temperature throughout a building.
Le 13 janvier 2014, Google a officialisé le rachat de la start-up Nest, spécialisée dans les thermostats intelligents. Véritable séisme pour le secteur énergétique et la Silicon Valley plus largement, le géant américain de l'informatique a déboursé pas moins de 3,2 milliards de dollars pour s'offrir cette jeune société créée en 2011 par Tony Fadell et Matt Rogers, deux anciens directeurs d'Apple. Cette opération propulse Nest au deuxième rang des acquisitions jamais réalisées par Google (derrière Motorola Mobility en 2012, pour 12,5 milliards de dollars). [1]
