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, Interesting) by urza9814 on Friday November 07 2014, @04:35PM
I'm planning to network my thermostat and a bunch of other appliances when I buy a house in a year or two. No way in hell am I buying one of these NEST devices -- I'll build my own system with a Raspberry Pi -- but I can think of a couple interesting uses for putting it online.
One example: Programming it based on external data, like the weather. It may be 50 degrees when I wake up, but if it's going up past 70 before I get home, you can shut the heat completely off while I'm at work. On the other hand, if it's 50 degrees out and getting colder before I leave, you should probably turn it on and maintain the current temperature. Won't be a huge difference, but might save a bit of energy.
A better, but less interesting example: Programming it based on my actions, rather than the clock. I work in a performance testing lab that runs 24/7. So some days I'm working 7am-3pm, other days I'm working 3pm-11pm. Sometimes my shifts switch with less than 24 hours notice. Sometimes they switch more than once in a single week. So with a smart thermostat, my phone can send it a message when I arrive at the office to turn it down, and send another message when I leave the office to turn it back up. With a programmable thermostat, I'd need to reprogram the thing once or twice a week!