Hasta La Gadget!

It’s fair to say Motorola had a big 2013, and SlashGear sat down with Steve Horowitz, senior VP of software engineering, and Steve Sinclair, VP of product marketing, at CES … Continue reading

Nest says that it’s not going to just hand over its customer data to Google willy-nilly post-acquisition – in a blog post sent to TechCrunch penned by Nest founder Tony Fadell, a question and answer section at the end contains the following:

Will Nest customer data be shared with Google?

Our privacy policy clearly limits the use of customer information to providing and improving Nest’s products and services. We’ve always taken privacy seriously and this will not change.

This contrasts with some of the reactions making the rounds on Twitter, which express apprehension about the fact that Google will have access to Nest’s data, which knows, for example, where you are in your house.

Oh PS with Nest’s built-in sensors now Google knows when you’re home, what rooms you’re in, and when you’re out. Just FYI.—
Ryan Block (@ryan) January 13, 2014

It’s interesting because the immediately apparent upside of Google acquiring Nest would be the data it stands to gain access to. Still, the quote above indicates that it won’t use data from its devices any differently than it does now, and Nest will continue to operate as a separate entity. There’s no outright “No” answer to the question before the explanation about the privacy policy, however (I’d bet anonymized data still gets shared), so we’ve reached out to Google and Nest to hopefully clarify exactly how the relationship will work.

In the meantime, the startup’s early supporters stand to make a lot of money on the deal.

Surprise! Google just announced it has acquired the home automation startup, Nest, for $3.2 billion.

Read more…

Nest is now rolling out a 4.0.1 update to its smart thermostat after last month’s faulty 4.0 firmware caused Wi-Fi and battery issues. However, it tells me the 4.0 bugs are not responsible for turning people’s heat off or down in the dead of winter. Instead, it says incompatible furnaces and people forgetting to change their air filters are to blame.

This paints a much rosier picture than if you check out Nest’s Facebook wall or run a Twitter search on it.

@nest Coldest night in Iowa in years, and I wake up at 4 AM with the temp. dropped to 54 degrees, and the Nest is cycling on/off constantly.—
Richard Harms (@richharms) January 06, 2014

Customers like Clayton and Richard (seen above) have been flocking to social media to report Nest problems ranging from annoyance to disaster. Some say they’ve come home or woken up in the middle of the night to a freezing cold house. When they investigate their Nest, they find it turning on and off repeatedly, or suddenly out of battery. In some cases it’s shut off or down their heat. One unlucky customer had his pipes freeze because his house got so cold.

One user wrote to TechCrunch explaining his Nest issues in detail:

“At about 4PM Friday, our heat shut off without warning. On inspection, the Nest unit appeared to be stuck in an endless loop of power cycling.  Each time it powered on, it would display the spinning blue loading indicator, and then a message would appear, instructing that we detach the Nest from the mount and reattach it. After being reattached, the unit displayed a message indicating that it was restarting, and the process would repeat indefinitely.

We followed the online troubleshooting guide with no success. We then tried to call support, but were met with impressively-long wait-times and a message acknowledging the existence of a breaking software change that seems to have been pushed out just as the bulk of the country was starting to rely on their furnaces.”

While there are plenty of happy customers who’ve had no problems, others are angry Nest didn’t proactively notify users about the 4.0 bugs. Instead, last month Nest posted to its support center about “Intermittent low battery or connectivity issues with thermostat software 4.0″. There it says:

“We have discovered a bug in our latest 4.0 thermostat software that affects a small percentage of our users…affected users will see a low battery warning on the thermostat, see their thermostat as “OFFLINE” intermittently in the app, and won’t be able to control them using the Nest app….As of Sunday, Dec. 8th, we have a short-term solution and have started updating affected thermostats. We’re rolling these thermostats back to version 3.5.3, which should fix the problem.”

Unfortunately, some people rolled back to 3.5.3 are experiencing a new set of issues. Exacerbated by lots of new users installing Nest products they received for Christmas, customers contacting support are enduring extremely long wait times. Those who do get help on the phone or over email are given long sets of instructions to troubleshoot their own devices.

Affected customers are demanding Nest do more thorough testing of its updates before pushing them out, or at least provide a way to turn off automatic updates. In the meantime, some are switching back to their old, cheap analog thermostats.

But today, I spoke with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers who says the 4.0.1 update is ready and is now being rolled out. He also denied that Nest issues shut off people’s heat. In a statement, the company explains:

“As stated in the support center message, the 4.0 update caused a small percentage of customers to lose Wi-Fi connectivity and therefore the ability to control the temperature remotely. Their heating and cooling remains unaffected except for remote control.  We’ve rolled many of those customers back to 3.5.3 to resolve Wi-Fi connectivity while we work on the fix. In the coming days, we expect to release version 4.0.1, which has the same Wi-Fi performance as 3.5.3 with all the great features of version 4.0.

Regarding the small percentage of customers who experience drained batteries, we work with users who contact our Support team on a case-by-case basis because there are many variables that can cause this – including homes with clogged air filters, or with old or unusual HVAC wiring. Sometimes the fix is to run a power wire, other times the customer’s system is incompatible with Nest. To clarify, this is not related to the 4.0 update. “

It seems anyone with problems or considering buying a Nest should be sure to change their air filters and ensure their furnace is compatible.

Still, Nest will need to better educate customers and ramp up support to avoid being blamed for problems it didn’t cause. Otherwise, customer issues like these could shake confidence in Nest right as Re/code reports it’s trying to raise $150 million to $200 million at a $2 billion to $3 billion valuation. Fortune’s Dan Primack says this round “remains very much a work in progress.”

That work could get a lot harder if investors worry Nest is souring opinions of some of its earliest adopters, even if it’s not responsible for problems. Because accurate or not, people’s opinions on social media influence their friends’ buying habits.

Every product has its vocal minority of jilted users and we can’t verify that all the issues customers are reporting are entirely Nest’s fault. But there seems to be a critical mass of discontent right now. For what it’s worth, though, Rogers sounded legitimately saddened about the 4.0 problems distressing customers, and told me “We do take these things really seriously, even if it’s not our fault.  We’ll answer support calls and we’re always there to help people when they have issues.”

As we move toward having more of our lives managed by high-tech devices, their creators will need to double down on stability and security. Unlike work or entertainment gadgets, devices like Nest’s thermostats and smoke detectors are vital pieces of home infrastructure. Software bugs don’t just cause inconveniences, but real quality-of-life and safety issues. “Move fast and break things” just doesn’t work when you’re involved in our survival.

Many in the tech world and Washington have railed against the encroaching and limiting effect of patents on innovation, but when the chips are down, IP and patents remain key cornerstones in how tech companies and their founders are making sure they will be able to build their businesses and stick around for the long haul. Tony Fadell, the legendary former hardware supremo at Apple and now CEO and co-founder of new smart home device startup Nest, today revealed that Nest already had 100 patents granted, with 200 more on file with the USPTO and another 200 ready to file.

“At Nest what we did was make sure that we are putting [effort in] a ton of patents,” he said on stage today at the LeWeb conference on Paris. “This is what you have to do to disrupt major revenue streams.”

Nest, which first hit the market last year with a smart, design-friendly thermostat that you can control remotely with an iPhone app, this year added to its range with a smart smoke and carbon monoxide detection and alarm system. But the company has also had its share of patent heat.

It has been embroiled in a thermostat-related patent infringement suit brought by appliance maker Honeywell initially in February 2012, and in November 2013 saw another patent suit get filed from BRK, makers of the First Alert smoke alarms, for infringements related to Nest’s second product.

Nest has also taken steps to buy insurance from elsewhere to shore up its patent position. In September it announced a deal with Intellectual Ventures — one of the most well-known of the patent hoarders — for access to some 40,000 patents via IV’s “IP for Defense” subscription-based product. Nest can draw on these patents as a defendant or in the event of a counterclaim — as it happens to be in the case of Honeywell.

Part of the IV deal also included the acquisition of an unspecified number of patents, “in areas of interest to Nest, including systems and methods for automatic registration of devices.” It is unclear whether Fadell’s patent citation today — totalling some 500 in all if you count granted patents, those waiting approval, and those yet to be filed — include the patents that Nest would have picked up from IV.

You might argue that part of Fadell’s bullishness about patents comes out of necessity because of these suits, but on the other hand you have to remember that he comes from Apple, one of the most aggressive technology companies when it comes to using patents to defend its products, and also filing a lot of them almost as a smokescreen to mask what it may be planning next.

Patents are not the only game in town, of course. In talking about what he saw as important elements of building a business, Fadell also touched on the challenges of hardware startups, and the pitfalls of Kickstarter. You can get a lot of public support (and even financial support) for an idea, but “if you do not plant the seeds early enough” for how you will manufacture and distribute that concept at scale, he said, you will not go anywhere. (Yes, he said this last year at LeWeb, too.)

The other area that Fadell believes we are seeing a shortfall is in how disruptive products are being marketed to consumers.

“You have to communicate what the problem is and what the benefit of the solution is,” as well as giving people an easy way to purchase it, he said. That is part of how you build trust for new, intelligent devices. “If people cannot trust our brand, our things will never sell,” said Fadell. “The ‘Internet of Things’ will never take off if people do not trust the products.”