SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Nest plans to offer its smart thermostat to Irish consumers for free when they sign up for a two-year contract with Electric Ireland. Nest chief executive Tony Fadell said at the Web Summit in Dublin that the deal could put his company’s thermostats in up to 1.6 million homes, according to CNET, and claimed that similar deals would be announced for other countries in the future.
[...] Google is infamous for its ability to offer consumers products which are paid for not by their users but by the ads those users see. Its products are among the best in their categories, and when it’s free to use them, there’s little reason for consumers to pay for another service. Now Google is just applying that same logic to the real world — and it will probably work out for it just as well.
Even I’ve grown sick of hearing this sentiment, but it’s more relevant now than ever: If you aren’t the one paying for a service, you are the product.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Geezer on Thursday November 06 2014, @01:22PM
This mystery was definitively solved in 1971 at the North Hall dormitory at the University of Redlands, when an asian exchange engineering student volunteered to be placed inside a functional refrigerator with the shelving removed (originally to permit pony keg cooling). Unlike Schoedinger's cat, said student survived the experiment and was rewarded in the prevailing fashion of engineering students of the era: beer.