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Google buys Nest for $3.2 billion: Does this home automation acquisition point to ‘the internet of things’?

by Ian R Thorpe The Internet Of Things is comong, science and technology geeks tell us. These dysfunctional misfits wose only griends are machines long for the day when we finally surrender our humanity and freedom and become slaves to the machine. but how realistic are their claims, is it mostly just hype? Contact us:

Google buys Nest for $3.2 billion: Does this home automation acquisition point to ‘the internet of things’?

Ian R Thorpe

"Google’s $3.2 billion (£2bn) acquisition of Nest, a company that specialises in building sleekly designed, internet-connected products for the home, has sent shockwaves through the tech community – and for good reason."

Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas aimed to promote the idea that the ‘internet of things’ (adding computer chips, memory and software to ‘dumb’ appliances) will the next big thing in technology, with Cisco CEO John Chambers predicting that the market will be worth $19 trillion by 2020.

But despite this hype, most ­of the products soon to be available don't hold much attraction for the average consumer on the average income. Do you really want a washing machine that can text you to complain about supermarket own brand detergent? Or a microwave which you can have on the meaning of life?

internet of things
Internet Of Things: Picture source tx-english-ch.com

Peter Nieh, a partner a Lightspeed Venture Partners and a Nest investor, ­told the Financial Times that the company’s “magic” was its ability to "marry software and hardware in a way that makes them sing together in a customer experience."


from The Financial Times

Nest’s brilliance is that it cuts through this confusion, creating technologies that have been hailed for their ease-of-use, attractive design, and for actually solving problems rather than creating them. They've only release two products so far (and these are only on sale in the US and Canada) but both have been extremely well received.

The Nest thermostat learns users' habits - you set it manually a few times and it will pick up and automate temperature changes depending on your routine - whilst the Protect smoke-detector takes some obvious steps forward by being easy to turn off (you can wave your hand at it), connecting up to your mobile for peace of mind on the move, and adding carbon monoxide detection to the traditional set up.

If you are thinking that the "Internet of things" bollocks sounds a lot like the kind of hype Apple would use to sell a fairly standard cell phone with a cutesy pie logo for three times the price of an equally serviceable phone from a less hyperbolic manufacturer, you could be onto something. Nest CEO and co-founder Tony Fadell is a former Apple executive e known as the "godfather of the iPod", and many are surprised that the company was sold to Google and not the world's most hypocritical fascist corporation.

Business Insider went so far as to suggest this could be down to a long-standing animosity between Fadell and British-designer Jony Ive (credited with the look of Apple's most famous products and now head of industrial design at the company).

Apple has not yet revealed any plans to get involved in the 'internet of things' market, but it has a number of products in its portfolio that could fit into the nerd's wet dream lifestyle. iBeacons, for example, has been described as an "indoor GPS" that tracks your exact location in a house (for apple fanboys who are so thick they don't know whether entered a room intending to have a dump or make a cup of coffee), whilst Siri's voice recognition would also be useful in issuing commands at home (enabling thick fanboys to tell their dishwasher to make them a cup of coffee - well at least it would taste like Starbucks).

There's nothing definite from Apple yet, but when it comes expect it to arrive presented in a drab grey box and be hailed as a design masterpiece and fanboys to queue for days to get their hands on one from the first batch, only to have to go straight to the back of the queue again to wait for the arrival of version 2 to replace their now obsolete and unkool version 1.

Beyond the stupid factor that will make some people buy a pointless gadget just because a technology company tells them to, there are privacy issues to consider here. Big internet players are known beyond any reasonable doubt to play fast and loose with users' privacy. In using the internet we give up personal data in exchange for services whether we intend to or not. Google has been one of the biggest privacy violators, using info about its users to created personal profiles which it sells to advertisers enabling them to hit is with targeted ads. Adding information about your home habits would surely be a step too far for most people.

Fadell has given assurances that Nest’s privacy policy will remain unchanged. To anyone who knows Google however it seems pretty inevitable that before very long your Nest enabled domestic appliances will be linked to a Google server so they can gather even more info about users’ daily routines.

On top of all these drawbacks, what about the security issue. We know, thanks to recent leaks and whistleblowing that Microsoft, Google and other technology firms have built postern gates into their software to allow government agencies to collect users data. And we know that no internet connected device is 100 per cent secure. Do we want to surrender control of our lives to Washing Machines, Microwave Ovens, Television sets and crazy OCD-bell-end hacker cliques with names like Anonymous or The People Of Evelyn Tent?

How hard is it to set the washing machined for cool wash? not as hard, I would guess, as recovering cash siphoned from your bank account or convincing a court it was not you who used your credit card account to subscribe to a kiddie porn website, but your washing machine, after you had fallen out with it over skid marks in your guzzies.

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