[telecom] Nest's Smarter Home

Nest's Smarter Home

Two men who created the iPod and iPhone injected new technology into the humble thermostat. Now they have their sights on the rest of your house.

By Tom Simonite February 15, 2013

MIT Technology Review March/April 2013

In 2007, Tony Fadell believed he could see the future. He was an Apple executive who had created the iPod and was a leading figure on the team that had worked on the iPhone, which the company was about to launch. He knew people would soon form attachments to the Internet-connected computers they carried in their pockets, and he kept thinking about that as he started another major project: building an energy-efficient dream home near Lake Tahoe.

"I said, 'How do I design this home when the primary interface to my world is the thing in my pocket?'" says Fadell. He baffled architects with demands that the home's every feature, from the TV to the electricity supply, be ready for a world in which the Internet and mobile apps made many services more responsive. When it came to choosing a programmable thermostat for his expensive eco-friendly heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, Fadell blew a gasket: "They were 500 bucks a pop, and they were horrible and doing nothing and brain-dead. And I was like, 'Wait a second, I'll design my own.'"

Fadell, who soon left Apple at the age of 40, became convinced that his thermostat needed to be built like a smartphone and controlled from one. He wanted it to be smart enough to learn his routine and to program its own schedule accordingly, or to switch off automatically if he went out. A thermostat, he thought, could do that if it was really a small computer connected to the Internet. As he planned the features and design in his head, Fadell began to believe that his vision would appeal to other people too, even if their homes were more ordinary. With about 10 million thermostats sold in the United States every year, it could be a lucrative business. And because thermostats typically control half the energy used in U.S. homes, a better-designed one could significantly reduce power consumption. He sought out Matt Rogers, a precocious 27-year-old who at the time led iPhone software development, and got him to leave Apple to cofound Nest.

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Reply to
Monty Solomon
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I once saw an article in a local paper about how the police had acquired infra-red detectors to locate "grow" lamps so that they could arrest marijuana home-grow operations. I mentioned it to my friend, a mechanical engineer, and he laughed himself silly. "There are so many hotspots in New England homes', he opined, 'that they'll be chasing space heaters and leaking hot-air furnaces for the rest of their lives".

The problem with "smart" thermostats is that they're installed in dumb environments. Unlike Mr. Fadell's dream house, most homes are energy nightmares, with late-20th-century insulation, 1950-style windows, and air leak after air leak, all adding up to a heat load that tries the souls of every homeowner attempting to meet a budget.

The end result is that a smart thermostat alone isn't going to make any difference worth mentioning: it might allow a user to delay a reheat cycle when she's working late, but (as my engineer friend is found of pointing out) it's the "everyday" items that kill you, not the "now and then" exceptions.

As much as I might wish it were so, the solution to an energy- ineficient home is to invest the time and money needed to minimize heat losses. The U.S. is, unfortunately, still in the "denial" phase of dealing with our enery problem: the inefficiencies that are built into our homes, our electric grid, and our businesses won't be solved by smarter thermostats, no matter if they can be programmed from a cell phone or not.

Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my address to write to me directly)

Reply to
Bill Horne

Which, thanks to the fourth-amendment hawks on the Supreme Court, they have not been able to use for the past dozen years, at least for the purpose of gathering evidence about activities taking place in private homes. Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001). However, the rationale used in the opinion of the court by Justice Scalia (joined by Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ.) seems rather strained to me.

You can read the Wikipedia article about the case, which includes references to the full text and background information, at .

-GAWollman

Reply to
Garrett Wollman

The real question isn't about grow lamps (which are easily confused with space heaters on an IR scan), but about how it is becoming harder and harder to maintain any sort of privcay in an interconnected world. In the case of Smith v. Maryland, [442 U.S. 735 (1979)], SCOTUS held that police could obtain "pen register" data, A.K.A. "Local Usage Details", without a search warrant. That kind of data is used for "traffic" research, an investigative and military intelligence technique which is able to divine the locations of key players in an organization based on the number and destination of each call.

In the United States, although police are expected to obtain a warrant to actually "tap" a line, i.e., to record people speaking on phone calls for use as evidence in prosecutions, they are not required to do so before requisitioning the "LUDs" from a phone company. I was a Systems Analyst in the department which produced such records, and I can attest from personal knowlege that the procedure was both efficient and commonly used.

The problem, to my mind, is that when bureaucrats get their hands on a fragment of a picture, they tend to make up the missing pieces instead just accepting that they are missing. While it might be interesting to a prosecutor to know that my phone was used to call the home of a child who was arrested for dealing illegal drugs, I doubt the forces of justice would be willing to accept that I am friends with the child's parents. Moreover, their left-leaning politics are a matter of public record, and the fact that I had *any* contact with them could be used against me during investigations for security clearances, or as "background" information sent to hiring managers for even mundane civil-service jobs.

In short, be it "hot spots" in homes or "questionable" calling patterns on my phone records, data can be misued, and it's important to keep not only our houses secure from unreasonable searches, but also our public lives.

I wonder if Justice Scalia will draw another "firm but also bright" line around the databases which have been assembled over the past twenty years: those files, many located on servers in foreign countries, contain the social maps that reveal the political and commercial terrain of my son's friends and family.

FWIW. YMMV.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Horne

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