What home appliance do you hate the most? Odds are good it’s the smoke detector—that incessantly chirping, totally inconsistent mess of beige plastic that we can only hope actually works when needed. That may be about to change: Today, Nest Labs unveiled Protect, a Wi-Fi connected alarm that lets you keep tabs on your home even when nothing’s on fire.
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Nest Labs, the home hardware maker co-founded by two ex-Apple luminaries, is today unveiling its second product, Nest Protect, a $129 smart device that hopes to do for the smoke and carbon monoxide detection market what Nest’s Learning Thermostat did for home temperature control. That is, it wants to turn what has become for many a mundane, malfunctioning domestic necessity into a reliable and stylish must-have. Artfully designed, connected up with your smartphone, and full of features that work better than what it wants to replace, Nest Protect is the startup’s biggest play yet to make a global name for itself and position itself as a serious player in the connected home.
Of all the many things to disrupt in the home, why smoke detection? A couple of reasons, one personal and the other strategic.
“It was when I looked at it on the ceiling when i was lying in bed. I thought, What does this thing do? Is it going to wake me up tonight? Is it actually going to alarm properly?” explains Tony Fadell, co-founder and CEO of Nest, in an interview (which you can watch in full below). “Every time I thought about it, I [realized I] didn’t know anything about it. It was this strange product on my ceiling that just annoyed me. It never really was there for safety.” Talking to more people like his co-founder Matt Rogers, others at the company, and his wife and friends, Fadell said that everyone had a story about smoke detectors, all with a common theme: “A product that is supposed to keep you safe, except that it is annoying. Annoying, annoying, annoying.”
And yet, 30-40 million of them are sold every year. “Why don’t we like or appreciate them? That was the genesis for the whole idea of doing the Nest Protect.”
But it’s not just the sales volumes and existing bad, old products that spoke of opportunity to Nest Labs. While a thermostat is at its heart a (very) nice-to-have device, Protect takes Nest into the world of essentials. Smoke detectors are mandated in new-home builds in many countries, and insurance companies and others require you to have them installed, too. While Nest’s thermostat has some scaling issues to it — for example in the UK people cannot simply plug and play, but have to get professionals to install the devices because of the difference in electrical voltage — the same is not true for the Protect, which comes in a battery-powered version that can work, and therefore be sold, worldwide.
Just as Apple has taken technology and managed to both make it slick/aspirational but at the same time human and personal, so too is Nest Labs hoping to do the same with the Nest Protect.
“We didn’t just want to make a better one,” Fadell says of the square-shaped device that comes in white and black (yes, even in aesthetics the Protect departs from the circular look of today’s detectors). “We wanted to create something really emotional. Something that people could really like and embrace in their home, not just buy because the government tells them they have to.”
Indeed, there are many things about the Protect that take the product from bureaucratically-ordered home essential into more personal territory. For starters, the device has a human voice, which currently can be set to English, Spanish or French. The voice is there to warn you in a calm way if, for example, its batteries are low, if it detects carbon monoxide, or if it’s about to make a very loud alarming noise. “Heads up,” is the common refrain of the female, American voice sounds rather a lot like the U.S. Siri — perhaps not a coincidence.
It speaks more urgently simultaneously when an alarm is going off — a feature Nest says it created after reading research that noted children often sleep through the ringing noise of an alarm but will wake up at the sound of a voice.
Nest then takes those signals of reassurance and runs with them, for example with a feature it calls “Nightly Promise.” This is a flash of green light that the device emits after you turn off the light, to let you know that it is working. If you walk under it in the dark, it detects your movement and lights your way.
The human touch continues from there. If the alarm is possibly overreacting, rather than pushing lots of buttons or angrily tearing out 9-volt batteries (both usually involving clambering on to chairs or ladders to do so), you simply wave your arms — a double hat-tip not just to the frantic air-batting you may have done with a dishtowel in the past to get a mis-fired alarm to stop screeching, but also to the very 21st century wave of gesture-controlled gadgets.
“Touch” is as much an operative word here as “human” is. While smoke alarms are usually completely out of reach on the ceiling, Nest has followed the route of many hardware makers and created smartphone and tablet apps that let you communicate with and control the detector. These apps — completely rewritten so that they also work with Nest’s Learning Thermostat for some ecosystem building — alert the user of low-battery alerts, alarm notifications, and one-touch access to emergency numbers. You can use the app to monitor several Protect detectors at once.
Those detectors also work together to alert you to problems in other rooms in the house. The apps, of course, work even when you are not at home, giving you a remote way of monitoring if there are any any smoke, fire, heat or carbon monoxide issues when you are not there.
The Nest Protect has not been a quick follow-up to the Nest Learning Thermostat, the company’s first product, which launched two years ago almost to the week. But it has been no less anticipated.
Nest Labs’ CEO Tony Fadell is commonly known as the “father of the iPod” (maybe we can call him co-parent). And that makes him and Nest Labs immediate magnets for attention, sometimes foiling the company’s best efforts to keep things like this launch under wraps until now.
Just as Nest has been iterating on its Learning Thermostat (most recently opening up its APIs) we can expect to see more to come coming from Nest Protect in the future.
Taking a leaf from the playbook used by sensor-filled smartphone app makers, you can also imagine that Nest will come up with further ways of using the many sensors built into the Protect to roll out further services. The sensors disclosed by Nest in the device include a photoelectric smoke sensor, a CO sensor, a heat sensor, a light sensor, ultrasonic sensors and activity sensors. “I don’t know what else we are going to do but it seems like there are many exciting things in the future,” Fadell says. This is also important considering that Nest is not the only one going after the smart smoke detector market (here and here are two other players).
Just as one example, you can imagine several of these working as a house alarm system (remember, it’s called “Protect”). No surprise, then, that Nest says that in 2014 the Nest Protect will integrate with wired security systems. This is not just a hardware play, though: this also sets up Nest as the single app that can act as a hub to run all your connected home devices.
We have a hands-on demo of how the device works — and how to install it — from co-founder and VP of engineering Matt Rogers, who boldly let us install the Nest Protect on one of his office’s walls to see how it works (this guy! amirite?). Stay on the stream directly following that to hear the one and only Tony Fadell talk about how he came up with the idea of the Nest Protect, defend against the idea of extra features as gimmicks, and much more.
Nest Protect’s two black and white models are going on sale in November via Amazon, Apple, Best Buy and Home Depot in wired (120V) and battery-powered versions, starting first in the U.S., UK and Canada.
The Nest Learning Thermostat is about to get a sibling. The Protect. If this report is correct, the company behind the incredibly popular Learning Thermostat is prepping a smoke detector. Yep, a smoke detector, reportedly called Protect, — which sounds about right for Nest Labs.
Co-founder and VP of Engineering Matt Rogers recently told me in an interview (view below) that the company is targeting all the white crap in our homes. The boring, the mundane, the products like the thermostat that were previously unloved and ignored. Nest wants to reinvent them. And with the smoke detector, there is a lot to reinvent.
The report is light on details, speculating heavily that the smoke detector could be tied to a subscription account (not likely), link with Learning Thermostat directly (plausible), and hand gestures could silence the alarm (likely).
But the lowly smoke detector is ripe for reinventing and Nest is the company to do it. Like the thermostat before it, the smoke detector is a disconnected device but plays a vital role in homes. Yet, it’s a dumb device. If it smells smoke, it yells. But what if you’re out of the house? What if you know you’re going to burn bacon and the smoke detector is located on a 15-foot ceiling? What if you want to check the status of the battery? A connected smoke detector makes a whole lot of sense.
Nest Labs declined to comment.
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs.
I remember when the press first hit about Nest Labs. The guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on thermostats everywhere! A collective “huh?” went through the industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers at Google For Entrepreneurs‘ office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company on a mission to build one of the world’s only great hardware/software companies.
There are hard workers, there are really hard workers, and then there are the Matt Rogers of the world. If you think you work hard, please watch our entire interview and think again. Matt had an early start with his first Mac product interactions at age three. When asked as a child growing up in Gainesville Florida what he wanted to be someday, Matt would respond, “I want to work at Apple.” At 16 he was building robots and entering them into competitions with his classmates. As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon he agreed to basically do anything (anything being to help draw bones in CAD for a robotics hand project) to get a chance to work with the robotics lab. His Junior year he applied for an intership at Apple via Monster.com, and pestered employees until he got accepted. That summer he took on the worst grunt work project imaginable (he rewrote all the software for manufacturing for iPod), and had three months for what he described as a “one year project.” Seven days a week, 20-hour days, and “basically not sleeping.” How did it pay off? Apple awarded him a cash bonus as an intern, something VP of iPod at the time and eventual Nest co-founder Tony Fadell said, “He had never done before.”
Apple
After school he returned to Apple and spent the next few years working on the firmware for iPod nano and iPod classic. After his first weekend back at Apple, and spending Saturday and Sunday getting moved in and buying furniture, his manager approached him saying, “Where have you been?” Matt responded, “I went to buy furniture.” He replied, “You should have been here.” He responded, “Oh. I didn’t even know!” Matt said this, ”Set the pace for how iPod would be for the next five years.”
In December 2005, Matt and a small team started working on the first iPhone concepts in a project called “Purple.” At the time no one in the company knew what was going on, not even some of their own managers. They built the initial prototype in four months. It wasn’t good enough so they started again. The next version was the one Steve Jobs would unveil on stage at MacWorld in January 2007. Four weeks previous to that, 25-members of the team went to China to assemble each of the first 200-devices to be shown at MacWorld. The team was divided into a day and night shift to hit the deadlines, working through Christmas and returning after New Year’s Day.
The Founding of Nest
After shipping the iPhone, Matt led work on products like iPod nano and shuffle, parts of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. By late 2009 he had hired 40 people and managed these teams while still just in his twenties. That fall he had a two-hour lunch with Tony Fadell, his former boss at Apple who had left in 2008. Matt told Tony he wanted to start a company. “What do you want to do?” Tony replied. “I want to build a smart home company.” Tony’s response? “You’re an idiot. No one wants to buy a smart home. They’re for geeks.” But it turned out Tony was already building a smart home in Tahoe, with solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, and more. Tony honed in and focused on a single idea. “Why don’t you just build me a thermostat?” Matt replied, “Why not? We could build an iPod?” Tony responded, “We’ll do it in six months.”
Tony and Matt have what appears to be the ideal co-founder relationship stemming from Matt’s early internship days at Apple. “We think very much alike, to the point where we complete each other’s sentences. I don’t know if I would be able to do it without him.”
But was this the idea to risk his promising future at Apple? Matt had elevated from intern to Senior Manager in a few short years. “The more we dug, the more we realized, this is a company we must go start. We could save 10 percent of energy, solve an epic problem, no innovation (in the industry), multibillion dollar market. Why would we not do this?”
Matt quit his job in spring 2010, rented a garage in Palo Alto, and started cranking in secret. Matt would visit with old colleagues and tell them, “Will you quit your job? Will you come work (for free) with us on a new project I can’t tell you about?” The first ten hires worked for free for six months before finally raising money in October 2010. They bootstrapped with money from Tony and some from Matt. “We were all working basically severn days a week, twelve hours a day, it was crazy. Not everyone was living in the office – people have families, so they’d go home for dinner and then come back. It was craziness.” Everyone worked on Thanksgiving only taking a few hours off. Matt assured me no one got divorced adding, “All the wives are happy now.”
Still no one knew that Tony was even involved. “In the early days when we were fully stealth. “We had no website, no LinkedIn, we had nothing. Zero outbound communication. I wouldn’t even tell people that (Tony was involved). For all they knew, I was the only founder. To get people in the door the first time meant I did a lot of lunches, a lot of coffees to get people excited. I wouldn’t tell people on the first date – I’d show a little leg, but I wouldn’t go all the way.”
Even with limited funding Nest still managing to assemble a killer engineering team in the midst of a talent war exploding all across Silicon Valley. “It was a mixture of my old team at Apple, my old professor from CMU and a few folks from Tony’s early days at General Magic twenty years earlier. One guy was a VP at Twitter, one was running Microsoft User Experience. Unlike most startup teams the average age of our team was about 40. I think I was the youngest.”
A year after raising Series A capital from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Lightspeed, and Shasta, they shipped their first product. This past spring Nest was rumored to have raised $80MM at an $800MM valuation and shipping 50,000 thermostats each month. This company that was in a garage in 2010 now has 200 employees, and selling its products at Lowe’s, Apple Stores, and Best Buy. About half their inventory is sold online. Like most great companies in the Valley it is not without controversy. They were recently sued by Honeywell for patient infringement and as one friend in the home automation industry recently told me, “Everyone is watching Nest.” They also recently acquired venture backed energy dashboard MyEnergy.
Building HARD-ware
Nest shipped its first product 18-months after their inception, with 75-employees and having spent $10MM. “That’s with a team of extremely senior guys who have all done this a dozen times before. The difference between doing it a dozen times before at Apple, Samsung or Google and doing it on your own is that there is no backup. At Apple we worked on the project for a year, got it ready and hand it over to the operations team to go scale and shoot to the moon with. We all had roles we played at previous companies and that all went out the window at Startup Land. You have an HR hat, facilities hat, and janitor hat. Doesn’t matter, you have do it.”
Is it any surprise that there are so few hardware startups the Valley? Or that most entrepreneurs choose an app or a website over a hardware device? Entrepreneurship is hard enough not to have to layer in these additional complications. Matt adds, “I don’t believe I could build Nest if Tony and I didn’t have all that experience at Apple. It’s really hard to pull off fully integrated consumer electronic devices. It’s also really expensive to build a consumer electronic product. You have to build prototypes but you have to build tools. You have to get a manufacturing line set up. You have to front inventory costs. It’s crazy expensive.”
When our interview finished a few weeks ago, I walked Matt out to his car. It was 9pm, and he was cheerfully headed back to work for yet another late night at Nest. After hearing about the culture and work ethic at Nest, his attitude simply reminded me of how he described working a holiday a few years previously. ”That’s what it takes,” he casually said.
The humble thermostat isn’t the hottest gadget category, but the Nest thermostat has the right combination of attractive interface and smartphone integration to actually be lust-worthy. Instead of pokey up and down buttons, the Nest shows you the current temperature on an aluminum dial and glows either blue or red if it’s currently heating or cooling your home. After a week of manually setting the temperature, the Nest learns your schedule and starts to control your home temperature on its own. Plus, you can control it from your computer or smartphone. More »
It’s been just about a year since former Apple exec Tony Fadell unveiled his newest project, the Nest Learning Thermostat. At the time, it was notable for being the sexiest thermostat in the history of household automation, with WiFi connectivity, mobile apps and an iPod-like click wheel for adjusting the temperature. Today, Nest Labs announced the follow-up to that product, and while it boasts the same tricks as the original, it’s noticeably slimmer and will work with a wider array of heating and cooling systems. Oh, and the company is finally releasing an Android tablet app, while the current iOS and Android phone applications are getting updated with new features as well. It’s up for pre-order now for $249, while the old model has gotten a price cut to $229. That’s the short version, but if you head past the break we’ll give you a more detailed walk-through of what’s changed.
Gallery: Nest Learning Thermostat (2012)
Filed under: Household
Nest Learning Thermostat gets refreshed with a slimmer design, improved scheduling features originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Oct 2012 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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