Steve Thomas - IT Consultant
Another development today in Google’s long-term strategy to streamline some of its less-core business operations. Google Nest Renew — a load shifting service for Google Nest owners get them to consume energy at off-peak times when energy is less expensive, or there are “cleaner” grid options available when your grid is cleaner or energy is […]
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TechCrunch Live hosted a special, in-person event at CES featuring a long conversation with Ecobee CEO and founder Stuart Lombard. This was our first in-person TechCrunch Live, and I can’t wait to do more. We talked about a lot — how a startup can maximize CES, build delightful products, and how hardware startups can raising money.
Nest loomed large over a part of this interview. While Lombard and Ecobee claim to have produced the first web-connected thermostat, Nest, launched four years after Ecobee, defined the standard. After Nest burst from stealth in 2011, it forced Ecobee to retool its smart thermostat. As Lombard admits, Nest changed the trajectory of Ecobee. “[The Nest thermostat] taught us the difference between wanting to be good and actually being good,” he said, adding later, “It really forced us to retool and think about what it means to be great.”
And the early Ecobee products were not great. “We made a lot of compromises along the way,” Lombard said, showing off Ecobee’s first product to the TechCrunch Live cameras. The differences between the first Ecobee and the first Nest are striking: Where the Nest is constructed out of sleek metal and shiny glass, the Ecobee is all plastic. Sure, it worked well but it lacked the same appeal as the first Nest. He says, in short, as a startup, customers need to love your company and products.
I hear this sentiment a lot on TechCrunch Live. Great products delight in surprising ways. Where the Ecobee offered similar functionality, Lombard admits it wasn’t until the Nest hit the market that Ecobee developed a world-class user experience and design.
I hope you can take the time and watch the show. It’s embedded below, and it’s a must-hear for hardware startups. Trust me, this is one of the best TechCrunch Live events.
On CES:
Founding Ecobee: Developing a market segment and competing against Nest:
How Ecobee is still winning:
Fundraising for hardware
Ecobee CEO and Founder speaks to TechCrunch Live about CES, Nest, and finding product market fit by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch
The best way to drive lasting change is to create opportunities where the right thing to do is also the easy thing to do. The upcoming COP26 climate conference has the unique opportunity to incentivize new talent to innovate and deploy the widest variety of solutions possible to make this happen.
When it comes down to a split-second decision or a force of habit, the average consumer will always choose the more convenient path, even if that path is the “wrong thing to do.” Technology, coupled with deep empathy for the user experience, has the opportunity to meet consumers where they are – to offer solutions that not only meet the bare minimum of conveniently solving a problem, but also do so in a way that is better for more people.
All too often, I see companies – tech and otherwise – lose sight of this principle.
Let’s take a long-institutionalized example: recycling. Everyone knows that recycling is key to reducing waste and, in turn, mitigating climate change. We simply cannot keep making waste at the same rate that we are currently. Recycling is an attempt to alleviate the waste burden on the planet. The concept of recycling is simple: reuse old things in new ways. However, when the average consumer is faced with a split second decision between the blue bin or black bin, it’s much easier to toss an item into the black bin rather than take the necessary step(s) to investigate the exact recyclability of that item.
On the other hand, at Nest, we knew that average households wasted a huge chunk of energy when the thermostats were left set at the same temperature all day. We also knew that the last thing busy people (and everyone is a busy person) needs is to remember to set or reset their thermostat based on weather patterns, time of day or energy consumption spikes.
It’s one thing to tell someone to turn their thermostat off, because it’s good for the planet. It’s another thing to simply turn off their thermostat for them, automagically. When we added automation, energy usage data, app controls and a design that makes temperature regulation feel cutting edge, we had a product that we knew would drive lasting change. On average, the Nest Learning Thermostat saved 10-12% energy on heating and 15% energy on cooling per household (more stats here).
At Nest, we made energy saving in the home the cool thing to do, sure. But that’s not all. We educated our customers to see their personal cost benefit as well as the planet’s. Nest made it easier and more convenient for the average consumer to do the right thing.
But let’s zoom out from Nest.
This is a pivotal moment for technology to solve big problems. The biggest and most time-crucial of these problems being climate change. We have the opportunity to use the advancements we’ve achieved over the last few decades to make it easier for everyone — yes, everyone — to get involved with saving the planet. We need to create, fund, and champion technology that actually does good in tandem with doing well.
As an investor, I see tech companies either embracing or ignoring this principle every day. A few years ago, I met Arch Rao, founder of Span, and was immediately struck with how his idea makes a cumbersome task easier and, in so doing, causes positive change. Today, it’s really hard to electrify your home. Sure, you could install a solar panel or a battery in your basement, but it’s challenging for home owners to know if these instruments are actually helping them to save energy. Span is an electric panel that lets the homeowner control every circuit in the home right remotely through a phone app. Span introduced user-centered design to an unsexy category: home electricity.
This begs the question: if we can apply human-centered design, technology, great UX and end-to-end product thinking to more areas (no matter how “boring”), what kind of solutions can we build? What kind of big problems could we solve?
We’ve made great progress in moving towards solar and renewables, but it’s not enough. We must plan and dedicate resources towards solutions across all industries. This call to action may start at tech, but it needs support from investors, non-profit advocacy groups, and policymakers. And we need the leaders gathered in Glasgow later this month to set out a roadmap of incentives. There are no silver bullets to climate change and there is no one person, idea or company that will solve it. It takes all of us, it takes all our ideas.
Simply put: people are motivated to do the right thing, but only so far as it is more convenient. As we build, let us embrace human nature as our challenge. Technology that stands the test of convenience will ultimately stand the test of time to drive lasting change. How can we make doing the right thing easier than doing the wrong thing? Figure that out, teach others how to do the same, and we will put ourselves a position to save the world.
Google’s Nest unit today launched its newest thermostat. At $129, the new thermostat is the company’s most affordable one yet, but it’s also the first to feature a new swipe and tap interface on its side, as well as Google’s Soli radar technology to sense room occupancy and when you are near the device.
Soli, it is worth noting, is not being used for enabling gesture controls. Instead, because the design team wanted a solid mirror finish on the front, Nest decided to use it purely for motion sensing.
The new thermostat, which is made from 49 percent recycled plastic, will come in four colors, Snow, Charcoal, Sand and Fog. The company is also launching a $14.99 trim kit to help you hide any imperfections in your pain when you install the new thermostat.
Image Credits: Nest
“It has this inviting form with this intuitive swipe up and down control, which lets you interact with this product really naturally, instead of pressing these tiny little buttons that most traditional thermostats have,” Nest product lead Ruchi Desai told me.
It’s worth noting that this new version is mostly meant for users in smaller apartments or condos, as it doesn’t support Nest’s remote sensors. To get support for those, you’ll need a Nest Thermostat E (which can occasionally be found for around $139) or the fully-fledged Nest Learning Thermostat .
Talking about learning, among the feature the team is highlighting with this release is the thermostat’s ability to help you schedule your custom temperature settings for different times of the day — and different days. Nest calls this Quick Schedule.
“Unlike the Nest Learning Thermostat, which has the auto-schedule [feature], this one actually offers the ability to create temperature presets, which gives you the ability to set up a schedule based on your lifestyle, based on your preferences,” Desai said. “It will also give you the flexibility of holding temperatures, which means it’ll override the schedule that you have in times when you need the control and flexibility.”
Image Credits: Nest
That sounds a lot like what you’d find in most of today’s smart thermostats from the likes of Ecobee and other Nest competitors, but it’s a first for Nest.
With its Savings Finder feature, the thermostat can also look for small optimizations and suggest minor tweaks that can result in additional energy savings.
Thanks to the new built-in Soli radar chip, the device can automatically lower the temperature when you’re not home. It’s a shame the team isn’t using the chip for any gesture controls, something Google did with its Pixel 4 phone, but the team tells me that it decided not to do this because it didn’t fit the user profile.
“I think that was a very conscious decision we made while designing this product, because for this product we really have the user in mind and we really wanted to focus on the features that were really important to this user. And these are brand new to smart home, they really wanted app control — it seems so basic to us but it’s a massive upgrade for them, right. And all these energy-saving features that come with the thermostat were something that they valued a lot. So we wanted to focus on the features that these users valued for this product,” Desai explained.
Maybe we’ll see Nest do more with this technology in the next iterations of its more expensive thermostats. For now, it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, though in all fairness, Soli in the Pixel 4 mostly felt like a gimmick and at least the Nest team is putting it to practical use here.
Image Credits: Nest
Like before, Nest promises that it will only take about half an hour or so to install the new thermostat. The app walks you through the individual steps, which should make the process pretty straightforward, assuming your heating and cooling system follows modern standards.
To control the thermostat remotely, you’ll use the Google Home app, where you’ll also find all of the smart features to help you save more energy.
The new thermostat is now available in the U.S. (for $129.99) and Canada (for $179.99 CAD). In Canada, the trim kit will retail for $19.99 CAD). As the team noted, between various utility rebates and rewards, a lot of users may be able to get theirs for only a few dollars, depending on where they live.
Image Credits: Nest
Arch Rao closed the $10.1 million financing round for Span, his company pitching homeowners on an upgrade to the fuse box, in the middle of February.
The company had already seen what was happening in China and had a sense of how tough things could be, but was undeterred by the bad news and its potential implications for fundraising or its business.
“I don’t think that the COVID situation was particularly negative,” for the Span business, said Rao. Indeed, Rao said things are already beginning to recover. “With the shelter in place being partially lifted [and] with solar and storage installation having been deemed essential… the large installers like SunRun saw their online sales had increased,” Rao said. “The limitation of this pandemic has been a shift of about a quarter for our upward slope to take effect.”
The forced downtime actually helped the company, said Rao, which worked on new product development and readied itself for what could be a busy season of sales. The pressures that are pushing customers to adopt solar and energy storage technologies — especially in states like California — haven’t gone away.
The state looks prepped for another bad season of wildfires and the stress of power outages and rolling blackouts could again drive owners to invest in off-grid power generation and storage, he said.
But Rao sees Span as far more than just a smart fuse box. Sitting at the intersection of the utility energy grid and the home electrical network gives Span’s device a unique vantage point from which to monitor and manage devices in the home and energy coming to or from it.
And he’s gotten some unique, expert validation of his vision in the form of an investment from Matt Rogers, one of the founders of Nest, which was the first billion dollar company to try and tackle home energy use and efficiency.
Through his investment firm, Incite Ventures, Rogers participated in the latest round for Span.
“We founded Nest to reinvent the largest energy user at home, the thermostat. We replaced an ugly household device with something that invited interaction and saved energy,” Rogers said in a statement. “Span has the potential to solve that for every load in the home. That’s why I’ve come on board as an investor to Span and an advisor to Arch.”
Image courtesy of Span
Rao’s vision for Span is just as expansive as the original idea that brought Nest to the world.
“Think of our software stack being very similar to an android device,” said Rao. “We have first party apps that Span is deploying and will offer an up our [sotware development kit] that third party vendors will use.”
A user can download the app and select the circuits or loads that they would want to allow an outside vendor to control in exchange for some kind of economic benefit, according to Rao.
“We’re trying to bring what the mobile industry has done for the last decade is an analogous model to what we want to bring in to the digital energy space,” Rao said. Given that the panel sits in a home for roughly thirty years, there’s an opportunity to lock customers in to the Span platform in a way that mobile phones never could.
Some partnerships — like the one Span has signed with battery supplier LG (a company that also makes appliances) gives an idea of the breadth of Rao’s vision.
“LG is a home appliance manufacturer and the road map is for us to tie into other home appliances as well,” said Rao. “You can extrapolate from that to the world of home appliances.”
Investors in the $10.1 million round for the company were led by ArcTern Ventures and joined by new backers Capricorn Investment Group, Incite Ventures. Previous financiers in the company included Wireframe Ventures, Congruent Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Energy Foundry, Hardware Club, 1/0 Capital, and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, and some of those firms returned for the new funding, the company said.
Driving their interest was the company’s position at the intersection between the grid and the home — and its attendant ability to monitor and control onside generation, storage and the majority of a consumer’s energy loads.
The company is focusing its initial sales efforts on the markets of Hawaii and California where strong government incentives can help to subsidize costs and drive demand, the company said.
In addition to the new investment round, Mary Powell, former chief executive of Vermont utility Green Mountain Power will join Span’s board as an independent member. Powell and Rao have a relationship that dates back to the startup executive’s work with Tesla.
“She set an example of what a customer-focused utility could look like, bringing the Tesla Powerwall to thousands of customers in the state of Vermont,” said Rao. “I’m excited to work with her again as we bring our panel to market.”
Image Credits: Span (opens in a new window)
The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a lot of activity around remote care, but a new project by Mount Sinai hospital, working in collaboration with Google’s Nest, shows how even on-premise care can be made safer using remote technologies. Clinicians at Mount Sinai have begun using Google Nest Cameras in patient rooms, to provide video-based patient symptom and vital sign tracking, as well as two-way communication.
Using Nest Cameras for this helps healthcare professionals including nurses and doctors to limit their potential exposure to COVID-19, allowing them to centrally monitor and provide care while limiting person-to-person interaction to only extremely necessary contact. This lessens exposure, which is crucial as frontline healthcare workers are particularly at-risk of significant viral load, which essentially means that the more you’re in contact with individuals infected with COVID-19, the more likely your immune system won’t be able to keep up and you’ll get infected yourself.
This also helps the hospital in another key way: preserving personal protective equipment (PPE). Remote monitoring means that staff will be able to use significantly fewer masks and gloves, ensuring that stock levels aren’t depleted quite as quickly as they would have been otherwise.
Google is installing the Nest Cameras in over 100 rooms at Mount Sinai in New York, and plans to provide up to 10,000 of the devices along with custom-designed monitoring consoles to hospitals across the U.S. The system is also designed so that Google doesn’t store any footage collected, and in fact doesn’t even have access to it to begin with, to preserve patient privacy.
Even with direct care is necessary to help protect lives, remote health tech clearly has a role to play in mitigating the worst potential impacts of the pandemic. This is probably still just the beginning of how we see this kind of technology be deployed to try to buttress health infrastructure under duress as the crisis continues.
If you’re looking at footage from your Nest Cam and the quality seems a bit lower than normal: it’s not your eyes.
In an email to users, Google says it is temporarily lowering the video quality of Nest Cams in an effort to limit how much bandwidth each camera uses and, in turn, “conserve internet resources”. The adjustment is rolling out over the next few days, and Google says anyone who has their quality settings adjusted will get a notification in the Nest app.
It’s the latest in a series of moves made by tech companies in an effort to keep the Internet stable through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. More people are at home during the day than ever before, video calling for work and school, or streaming content to pass the time — and that all requires bandwidth. Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube have each taken steps to limit the strain they might be adding to the network, while Sony has been capping PlayStation game download speeds.
While Nest cameras aren’t inherently using more bandwidth right now than they otherwise might, each camera already used a good amount of bandwidth day to day. A Nest Cam IQ, for example, uses roughly 400GB of data per month at its highest settings; cutting this down to medium high shaves that down to 300GB.
Google confirmed their plans with TechCrunch, with a Google spokesperson adding:
“To answer the global call to prioritize internet bandwidth for learning and working, in the next few days we’re going to be making a few changes. We believe these changes have the potential to help make it easier for communities to keep up with school, work, and everything in between.”
While they’re automatically making the change on behalf of the user (a move some owners are complaining is an overstep), Google notes that you’re able to bump your cameras back up to their highest settings should you see fit. They’re not capping the quality, instead just lowering settings by default — so if you’ve got a camera in a setting where every pixel counts, know that you’re going to need to adjust accordingly.
Google Nest, the smart home brand for Google’s line of smart speakers, thermostats, smoke detectors, and more, announced this morning that it will soon require all Nest users to enroll in two-factor authentication to further protect their account. The feature has long been available to Nest users, but was previously optional. Given that most users only follow the default settings, they were putting their accounts at risk of being accessed by an unauthorized person.
Nest says the feature will be required for all users who had yet to turn on two-factor authentication or migrate their account to a Google account.
The move to require two-factor comes shortly after rival Amazon announced a similar plan for Ring, which will require two-factor to be enabled sometime later this year. Ring’s version will support codes sent over text messages, the company said.
In Nest’s case, when a new login to your account is initiated, you’ll receive an email from account@nest.com with a 6-digit verification code. This code is what you’ll provide to confirm it’s you trying to login — and if you can’t provide it, you won’t be able to access your account. Nest, of course, would prefer that users instead migrate to a Google account to take advantage of Google’s own security protections, which offer a variety of methods for authorizing your account and other benefits, like suspicious activity detection and its “Security Checkup” feature.
Smart home devices have made national headlines in recent months for account hacks, which greatly disturbed users. People said their smart speakers began playing music on their own, in some cases. Others reported people speaking through the devices, terrifying their children. Often, these sorts of breaches are due to users relying only on a username/password combination alone, which is far less secure.
Nest also said it’s adding protection against automated attacks for those who haven’t migrated to Google accounts, and users won’t have to take additional steps to enable the feature.
Device makers like Nest and Amazon know that without forcing users to take the extra precaution, many will not seek out these extra security settings on their own.
While it’s good that companies are now waking up to the dangers of not making two-factor the default, they’ve already allowed the situation to get out of control, as these hacks indicate. That damages their brand long-term and makes people hesitant to buy. There’s really no excuse for not making two-factor authentication a requirement from the very beginning.
Google’s Nest is testing a new feature that will alert you to potential HVAC issues and even help you book an HVAC professional to fix it, thanks to a partnership with Handy. The company says the HVAC alerts are only available in select cities during the testing period. If you’re in one of the supported markets, the new HVAC alert email will include an additional link to a website where you can make an appointment with a repair professional.
Nest users have already been able to sign up to receive a monthly email, the Nest Home Report, which offers a summary of their home’s energy use, safety events, Nest news and information about other Nest products, among other things.
Users who had signed up for this email will be automatically enrolled to receive the new HVAC alert emails starting today, Google says.
Various events could trigger these HVAC alerts, but largely it’s based on warning signs that your Nest detects — like unusual or unexpected heating and cooling patterns.
For example, if the thermostat finds it’s taking longer to cool your home than usual, that could signal a problem with your AC system. The alerts aren’t meant to replace the need for regular HVAC maintenance or service pro expertise, but instead are meant to serve as a warning about a potential issue.
Nest will also take into account your area’s weather before making a determination about a potential problem, as something like an overnight cold snap could work the thermostat more than usual.
In the HVAC alert email, users will be informed as to what system (heating or cooling) experienced the issue. A link to an optional survey about how you resolved the problem, and what it turned out to be, will also be included. This data may be used to help the system get smarter over time, in terms of diagnosing issues.
Not all Nest alerts will mean there’s a need for a service repair pro to come out, of course. Sometimes the problem is as simple as a household member having left a door open, which allowed hot air in, for example.
However, if you decide a service call is warranted, Nest will also now be able to connect you to a local pro in your area. Of course, you can reach out to your original Nest installer (Settings –> Home info –> Nest Pro Installer), if you choose.
But in the test markets, Nest owners will receive emails that also include a link to a website where you can book a qualified HVAC pro. This is done via Handy, which Nest has partnered with on this new effort. That limits the feature only to select regions that Handy supports.
At launch, the Handy booking option will be made available to Nest users in 20 metro areas, including Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Las Vegas, and San Diego, and others. Over the course of the test, it will expand to more regions. Handy today supports a fairly large number of cities across the U.S., Canada and the U.K.
If you don’t want to receive HVAC alerts, you can opt-out using a link in the email.
While Handy is taking on the service calls from Nest users for the time being, Google could eventually choose to connect Nest users with Google My Business profiles in the future, if it chose, or even turn this into a new advertising destination for qualified HVAC pro’s.
To get started, users will need to first sign up for the Nest Home Report if they haven’t already. They’ll then receive alerts as necessary going forward.
Using scrap silicon as its feedstock, a New Orleans-based company called Advano has raised $18.5 million to manufacture battery components to enable more powerful, smaller, and longer lasting batteries.
The technology was innovative enough to earn the Lousiana-based startup a place in Y Combinator’s famed accelerator and has now attracted the attention of Mitsui Kinzoku, which is investing in the company as a strategic partner, and Tony Fadell, the famous product designer known as ‘the father of the iPod’ and the founder of the smart thermostat company, Nest .
Alongside Mitsui’s SBI Material Innovation Fund, Fadell’s investment firm Future Shape along with PeopleFund, Thiel Capital, Data Collective and Y Combinator are investing $18.5 million in new financing to develop Advanos manufacturing capacity and take its silicon anode material to market.
“Adding silicon to li-ion batteries can 10x their run-time. Imagine eliminating ‘range anxiety’: more EVs, less CO2. But no one has been able to solve four key issues concurrently: material expansion, cycle-life, cost, and drop-in manufacturing scalability,” said Fadell, in a statement. “Advano’s battery experts are the first to successfully tackle them all. In addition, Advano’s unconventional full-stack approach allows for the battery customization manufacturers require. Plus, they’re using sustainably-sourced silicon to combat the environmental effects of our transition to electric everything! Advano’s innovative work with silicon is the holy grail for batteries.”
Advano reuses scrap silicon thanks to a novel materials science process that Advano founder, and chief executive Alexander Girau first developed as a student at Tulane University.
Other companies, like Sila Nanotechnologies, have raised significant amounts of money to develop ways to integrate silicon into the battery production.
Basically, batteries consist of anodes, where current flows into a battery, electrolytes which conduct electricity and cathodes, where current flows out. In a lithium ion battery, anodes are typically made using graphite, which has limitations related to how much charge it can store. By replacing graphite with silicon, batteries should be able to store more energy, requiring less material thereby reducing cost and size, according to Advano.
Girau began his studies in molecular engineering and initially started working on gene therapies. The initial technology that the executive developed focused on creating surface functionalization in nanoparticles allowing those particles to behave in novel ways.
The innovation was taking that research from biology and porting it over into materials science and battery development. The process typically requires several steps to make the create the functional nanoparticles and attach them to silicon, but Advano’s founder says his company has developed a single-step process.
For Advano, the key is attaching a reactive nanoparticle to silicon scrap as those scraps are being crushed. Using that process, the company is able to produce functional silicon, according to Girau.
“We can improve the performance of any lithium ion battery,” says Girau. “We’re working with consumer electronic battery manufacturers first because the volumes are smaller and we can service those customers sooner.”
Every year, Consumer Electronics Show attendees receive a branded backpack, but this year’s edition was special; made out of transparent plastic, the bag’s contents were visible without the wearer needing to unzip. It isn’t just a fashion decision. Over the years, security has become more intense and cumbersome, but attendees with transparent backpacks didn’t have to open their bags when entering.
That cheap backpack is a metaphor for an ongoing debate — how many of us are willing to exchange privacy for convenience?
Privacy was on everyone’s mind at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, from CEOs to policymakers, PR agencies and people in charge of programming the panels. For the first time in decades, Apple had a formal presence at the event; Senior Director of Global Privacy Jane Horvath spoke on a panel focused on privacy with other privacy leaders.
Good news, satellite radio fans: SiriusXM is getting a bit easier to control on your various Google Home and Nest Mini speakers.
The streaming radio network is at long last getting support for Google Assistant, allowing you to say things like “Hey Google, play 90s on 9” and have the station start right up.
While SiriusXM has technically been compatible with these speakers for a while, getting it to play meant poking around the mobile app and sending your desired station over via Chromecast. With this update, all it takes is a voice command.
Google says the SiriusXM functionality should start rolling out this week. It’ll roll out in the US and Canada first, initially supporting English and later supporting Canadian French.
Getting any of this to work, of course, means having a SiriusXM subscription. As such, Google says that all Nest speakers and smart displays will include a three-month SiriusXM trial out of the box. (Just don’t forget to set that calendar reminder in case you want to cancel.)
