Privacy concerns may have factored into it, but I suspect it was more to do with signaling the natural relationship between home automation devices, much like the way they positioned it so that "YouTube" (video streaming service) is acquiring Twitch (video streaming service).
Dropcam runs on AWS [1], "ingest[ing] more video per minute than YouTube" [2] into S3. Presumably the cost savings from switching to Google infrastructure will be compelling enough to change that. They'll probably torture the semantics and say "the data is there but Google can't access it".
Naturally what what they mean is not, this data will never exist on a computer/network owned by Google. What they mean is we aren't going use video from your security camera for general Google projects, like street view, collecting large amounts of speech databases for voice recognition, figuring out what products you and enjoy using and tailoring advertising to fit that, or tracking epidemics in real time by monitoring how many people in your house are sick.
For now, maybe. But Google owns Nest, so Google owns the data, and one day they can easily decide to start looking at it. So either you don't care that Google can look at that data (which is fine), or you do care, and these kind of assurances should mean little to nothing.
Google has acquired Nest... so now Google has also acquired Dropcam
Nest wasn't an acquihire or an assimilation, but was always stated as a separately operating organization. As such, it makes total sense that Nest acquisitions are held as being under Nest.
If HBO acquired a show or a studio, you don't say that Time Warner acquired it. If NBC acquires a property, you don't say that Comcast acquired it. These arms lengths subsidiaries are at arms length for good logistical reasons.
Further it's interesting how much a privacy concern people think Google is on HN, yet in normal life the amount of trust in Google is...actually shocking. I mean Google makes no bones about telling you, endlessly, how much they know about you. They don't hide it.
>Further it's interesting how much a privacy concern people think Google is on HN, yet in normal life the amount of trust in Google is...actually shocking. I mean Google makes no bones about telling you, endlessly, how much they know about you. They don't hide it.
Interesting. We must hear from different companies. The Google I hear from only says they just know a few basic things like showing an interest in technology and possibly being a male. Google excessively downplays the amount of actual information they have access to via social connections, mobile device usage, search history, email contents, etc.
Only Google Now is entirely and absolutely built upon a pervasive trawling of everything you do, and users love them for it. It knows every location you regularly visit (categorizing them into locations like work and home), and will give you updated traffic and routing guidance. It knows every flight you take, package you have coming, sports team you ever searched up, things you've recently watched or searched, and on and on. If you have multiple devices, it happily and openly shares all of this data between devices.
They hardly downplay anything given that this is the entire foundation of an entire, front of market product.
From the January 3 "What's your prediction for 2014?" thread:
> The next Nest product will be a home security system. If you already own Nest thermostats or smoke detectors, their motion sensors will do double-duty as security alarms.
I had a Dropcam and was excited for its remote monitoring capabilities. As a camera it is excellent and the cloud recording is really well done. I set it up and left for vacation for 3 weeks. During this time, I got so many notifications of activity (at least 20 per day) that it rendered it completely useless. It's an interesting idea but when I got my first notification of activity I got so scared someone had broken into my house I was freaking out. By the end of my vacation I just turned off the notification altogether and returned it when I came home.
I don't want to spread any unwarranted negativity here, but does anyone know how this fits into Nest's business model? I get Dropcam's business model of letting people check in on their home when they are on the road, on vacation etc, but hasn't Nest's business model been data mining from the very beginning? How does placing cameras in customers' homes fit into this model?
I also wonder about the privacy policy question. Okay, so they won't share data with Google, but what are the restrictions of Nest employees to check out your cameras? At the very least, there are no technical limitations here and it's all a matter of policy.
Again, not intending to spread negativity but it would be interesting to see some discussion around these potential issues. Although I do hand over ridiculous amounts of private information to web companies (in reality, most of what's going on inside my head; there's plenty in my web-hosted diary that I've never told anyone), there is somewhere I would draw the line. And I think that line would go at uploading to the cloud what is going on inside my home, regardless of what the privacy policy says.
I think it falls into a sort of "home automation/monitoring" model. As we move further into the "Internet of Things" spectrum, Google and Nest are just securing their place. Think about how Microsoft and Sony's gaming platforms continue to build on the idea of being the only device you need for your TV. I wouldn't be surprised if Nest sought to acquire someone like Fitbit for the same thing, monitoring health/fitness via the bracelet or weight scale; or an automated garage door opener company (if they did monitoring/diagnostic work when the car is in the garage).
I think Apple is in this battle as well. With the new iOS 8 / Yosemite releases, they are targeting the home automation & health monitoring markets. Google & Microsoft had better have something to offer because Apple is getting ready to eat their lunch.
Nest's business model is to sell a product for a profit. From that perspective, it's the same as Dropcam.
More than the business model though, Nest's goal seems to be to use sensor data and usage patterns to provide home automation with as little management as possible. Dropcam is essentially just another sensor - they're already doing things like recognizing people in the video feed. It's a way to get more data into nest's algorithms, and to get sensors into more areas of your home.
Once you make it real (with an actual working model), the fantasy top-end projections of vapor-models disappear. Anchoring projections in realities of the market can be a real downer.
I work for a startup providing a similar product to Dropcam. The difference being we are free, and you can choose from a variety of supported cameras (we have ~ 30 supported cameras).
$9.99 a month or $99 a year for a rolling 7 days of video. I guess most of that is a still, unattended image. Amazon cloud storage is cheap. It seems very expensive to me.
For example. My flatmate has a child. His ex-partner is prone to make stories in her head and go to the police with that. I'd be keen to host the kid until the father comes back from work, but I'm afraid of the ex-partner's accusations. I'm looking for a cloud storage service to store those hours for a few years, not to serve as legal proof, but to reassure the ex- that nothing weird happened. With Dropcam, that would cost me a few thousands dollars of storage per year, or am I mistaken?
I think you can export the video snippets and save them to local storage. This would allow you to keep as much video as you want, basically for free. It would be nice to have it linked in to Google Drive so that you can store selected video snippets there.
Likely the timing is because of stock exchange regulations. Google is publicly traded company so announcing it on different time may gave someone "unfair advantage".
Doing that 5pm Friday after market closes give everyone 2 days to process that information.
There was no reason to down vote this comment, it is probably exactly right. A lot of announcements for publicly traded companies are made at 5PM on a Friday.
Donna: What’s take out the trash day?
Josh: Friday.
Donna: I mean, what is it?
Josh: Any stories we have to give the press that we’re not
wild about, we give all in a lump on Friday.
Donna: Why do you do it in a lump?
Josh: Instead of one at a time?
Donna: I’d think you’d want to spread them out.
Josh: They’ve got X column inches to fill, right? They’re
going to fill them no matter what.
Donna: Yes.
Josh: So if we give them one story, that story’s X column
inches.
Donna: And if we give them five stories …
Josh: They’re a fifth the size.
Donna: Why do you do it on Friday?
Josh: Because no one reads the paper on Saturday.
Donna: You guys are real populists, aren’t you?
There are also other reasons, maybe they were rushing to complete the deal by EOD, if you try to keep it quiet over the weekend, might leak out in a haphazard way, want to release outside market hours, etc.
Not too coincidentally, a lot of the SEC filings with really bad news seem to happen in the last minute of filing activity on Friday. (Not that this particular announcement is very material or bad news)
If they need the whole weekend to find the right tone to explain this acquisition, yes. Looking forward to seeing how Google handles the privacy concerns on this...
You mean Google is. Remember when Schneier said no too long ago that "Google is in the surveillance business"? Even I didn't take it so literally back then, but it turns out he was just slightly ahead of time with that characterization.
Misread that as "Schmidt said" and was surprised but not totally shocked (e.x. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place")
so if google owns nest and nest nad owns dropcam if you have a dropcam and the NSA wants to come blackbag your house can they delete the video off the cloudhosting warnetlessly?
Perhaps they were concerned about leaving Dropcam as a/to a competitor and taking on Logitech; whilst acquiring Dropcam they can take out 2 competitors in one go as no-one else seems to want to take on Logitech? [Pure speculation].
Because the Logitech brand is fugly, that ship is sinking and can be scooped up for less if they care to. This wasn't about technology, brand and customers.
The reason for this acquisition is clear. Its why Nest was bought, its why Dropcam was bought. For Eric Shmidt's whole life his brother would turn down the thermostat and Eric would be too cold. He would accuse his brother and his brother would play innocent. It was infuriating.
But now. Billions of dollars later. Finally, Eric will always know who is screwing with his radiator.
Some interesting quotes from Dropcam's CEO last year:
“Our business model is very straightforward. I think if your business model is not straightforward, it veers into potentially being unethical, if you look at things that are quote-unquote ‘free.’ None of the people who work here want to work on something that works like that. They look at it as tricking the user, when [a company is] turning around and using some part of the user’s data to make revenue."
and
"He thinks the lavish perks at many technology companies, especially the free on-campus meals, are a disguised form of mind control, designed to get employees to work 12- or 14-hour days."
He thinks the lavish perks at many technology companies, especially the free on-campus meals, are a disguised form of mind control, designed to get employees to work 12- or 14-hour days.
WTF is wrong with people!?! I'd work my butt off at a place that provides thrice-a-day healthy, delicious, diverse, vegetarian (for me) meals, on-site gym and sleeping pods!! Hell, I'd have surely done that when I was a decade younger! I hate cooking and it is ridiculously expensive to buy food with my dietary constraints in the open market. Especially food that is not only delicious but also healthy in the long term.
Why is there this utterly misguided hatred against "company food"?
Even after breaking down my yearly compensation to an hourly rate, I bet there will be a marginal difference in the money the company makes by keeping me working the extra hours and the price I'd pay for buying such food everyday (remember, I hate to cook).
Plus, nobody forces you to eat that food, if you really prefer cooking your own food or buying it from elsewhere, keep doing that.
I really feel that good, healthy food is an awesome incentive and stigmatizing it reeks of a bloody first world problem.
> I'd work my butt off at a place that provides three-a-day healthy, delicious, diverse, vegetarian (for me) meals
> Even after breaking down my yearly compensation to an hourly rate, I bet there will be a marginal difference in the money the company makes by keeping me working the extra hours and the price I'd pay for buying such food everyday
Any company providing you multiple meals per day for free is getting the better end of the bargain. Make no mistake about it. It's an arbitrage between the cost of cooking labor + cooking material vs. your labor.
In other words, you're getting the short end of the stick. People do not value perks rationally. If they did, they would deny every last one of them.
In other words, you're getting the short end of the stick. People do not value perks rationally. If they did, they would deny every last one of them.
How many people value anything rationally? Ever?
As humans we are programmed to be pain averse. I hate foraging for and/or cooking my food. I consider it an utter waste of my time and breath. Yes, I care about my health, but don't have the money to pay an arm and a leg for a personal chef, or even plan meals. In short, I want to eat well (tasty+healthy), but without any direct effort on my part. That is the pain I am averse to. If a company can remove that pain, for me it is a fair exchange, even if in a most superficial manner.
Give and Take. Plus, no exchange in life is perfectly equivalent. Is it?
A personal chef isn't rational either--there are economies of scale here. But you could pool your and your coworkers' budgets to get an office chef, for an amount from your paycheque much less than the value of the time you're funging against by deciding to work overtime.
Fully realized, you could have all the benefits offered (selfishly) by your employing corporation instead provided by an employee's union co-op. Even the building. The corporation would just be thin pipe keeping labor flowing in one direction and money flowing in the other.
That would be such a whiney pain in the ass. This is like saying an air conditioned office is an irrational perk, it isn't. It is better for everyone. Besides, if you get your work done at Google there is nothing stopping you from reading a book during the one extra hour of overtime you'd have to waste between lunch and dinner.
There was a company, a big one, that I forget the name of that was run like that through the second half of the 20th century, but I can't remember the name :(
Perhaps it was Mondragon? Mondragon started in 1956 and is now at 80000 workers and an annual revenue of 14 billion. It's still a worker cooperative in the 21st century, though :)
Not a US company or established in the US. So not the example I asked for. I am aware of other non-US cooperatives, eg. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
Personally, I like cooking but for someone who wants to eat well/healthily but (strongly) wants it to "just happen," a Google-style company cafeteria actually seems like a pretty good benefit. Even eating out takes effort, especially if you're picky about what you'll eat even within the domain of quality/"healthy" (whatever your parameters are for that).
Personally, quite the opposite actually, if you read my full comment.
Have you EVER foraged in your life?
You mean, by the dictionary definition of foraging? In the wild? Then, No. But, if you mean gathering edible items that are uncooked or semi-cooked, to be cooked for creating a meal, then, Yes. And I consider it an utter waste of time. So, what's your point?
As for the nutrition value of Google meals, perhaps you know more than I do? Are you a (ex)Googler? I'd wait to hear from some current Google employees to get the truth on this point, rather than rush to judgement.
Just because you are getting less out of the deal than they are does not mean you are getting less out of the deal than not having any deal at all.
The deal "provide me a decent meal and I'll stay at work another hour or so" is, evaluated rationally, completely 100% fine by me. I'd rather stay at work for an hour than take an hour out of my day to cook & clean, or spend the equivalent of an hour's wage on feeding myself.
And this is called added value. The product is more valuable than its components simply added together. Something that hipsters who look very hard, every day, for injustices to fix, always seem to miss.
I would argue that if they gave you the money they spend on food in the salary, you would not be able to eat as well (or even half as well). The cost of the food that I get at my company is ridiculously low per person (this might not be true at smaller places, but I am in a 1000+ person office).
Wow, at first I thought that you were being sarcastic, but then I kept reading.
I don't know about you, but my salary (plus benefits) rate is about $95-100 / hr.
So, let's say I 'work my butt off' for an extra 4-6 hours a day. That is an extra $3000 of unpaid work, per week, that the company gets for giving me food. Or, $200 per meal.
(That's not even taking into account the considerable extra value that the company gets in owning the results of my work.)
I doubt 4-6 hours extra per day (13-14 hour days) is typical.
Aside from that quibble, look at it from both sides:
The company spends a few hundred dollars a week on meals and gets 5-10x return on that money. Everybody agrees this is a good deal for the company.
The employee trades a few hours of his life for food. The hours he works, he would not have received any money for anyway unless he was working another paying job. The employee is trading "opportunity costs" (imaginary value) and receiving substantial value in "free" food.
If the "opportunity cost" of those extra work hours are sitting in front of Netflix watching zombie movies, he probably got a good deal trading that time for food. If the "opportunity cost" is starting the next hot startup, he got a bad deal.
Talk to anybody who works for a company who offers meals. 12-14 hour days are typical at most. Not officially, of course, but that's the point. Raw ROI aside, the real benefit of offering meals is to foster the type of culture where the company is "home." You eat there. You exercise there. You socialize there. There's no need to have a life outside of work, so a lot of the employees don't have one. If you're always around your work and people you work with, chances are you'll spend most of your time thinking about and doing work. It's a way of getting 14 hour days out of people without them realizing it or complaining about it. In that way, it's absolutely a form of "mind control" (operand conditioning).
Most would say the above is harmless and it benefits the company, which benefits the employee, so why is it such a bad thing? It's bad because this type of culture makes it extra easy for engineers to burn out.
You probably generate a 5-10x multiple over your salary at most tech companies (if you're a dev or one of the other people those perks are "intended for"). At an early stage startup, it can be way more than that (because success or failure is kind of binary).
And that's with LOTS of overhead people, communications complexity, etc.
If you strip out just the developers at a big company which is very profitable and product focused, you'll get even more insane revenue-per-employee figures.
It's depressing/unpolitic to say, but the "free meals, shuttles, etc." are intended for the developers, management, and other highly-in-demand people. It's probably overall worse for corporate culture to set up multiple tiers of employees, some of whom don't qualify for those perks, but a company with huge numbers of easily-recruited, low-value-add employees (e.g. walmart) tends to have crappy perks; a company with a small number of key employees with absurd productivity and profitability per employee (hedge fund?) tends to have amazing perks.
(That startups tend toward binary outcomes based on the productivity of the first 5-10 people is probably not in dispute here, I assume and hope.)
I don't really mind staying late at the office (with has gigabit nLayer, a 4K monitor, free drinks and snacks, etc.) vs. at home (which has comcast, and is pretty small). The commute between the locations is a pain, but otherwise I have no real difference between "being online doing whatever I want to do" at home vs. at the office.
Right now, I'm working on a TC article and some conference talks on independent research. I'll probably drive home once the traffic is done. I'll go to my co-presenter's house Saturday night to work on the talks again.
The "work vs. personal" distinction is really secondary to me, compared to "stuff I want to do, vs. stuff I'm forced to do"; work-related projects are just as often "want to" as home projects are "forced to".
I'd gladly work an 11 hour day at a company that provided food if two of those hours were meals (lunch and dinner) and another hour was time spent in the gym/playing games. That's 8 hours of work, and three hours of free recreation that would have cost me a non-trivial sum of money elsewhere. I just wouldn't want that to be expected.
> "He thinks the lavish perks at many technology companies, especially the free on-campus meals, are a disguised form of mind control, designed to get employees to work 12- or 14-hour days."
Is there actually honestly anyone out there who doesn't think so? I mean, is it really disguised even? We give you stuff, you make your life revolve around the company. It's a very straightforward exchange in my opinion.
Hell, people have directly said to me in interviews "We want this company to be all you think about" when explaining why they'd prefer to hire me full-time rather than part-time.
On the one hand, you want to provide perks that offset personal cost to your employees AND reduce the amount of time it takes for them to do something like lunch with the result in increased productivity (ostensibly simply due to removing factors such as travel-time-to-lunch-place).
The company store comes to mid, as well.
There are many great benefits that companies do provide: free commute costs (bus, bike and ferry service) as well as on-site food...
Perhaps a way to quash any misgivings about such services would be to provide a daily per diem for services as pay, where you get the per diem pay UNLESS you partake of the companies service instead.
So you badge into each service and thus get that per-diem pay redacted from your check.
If you use NONE of the company's services, then you get that same portion of pay back.
This also has its problems, though.
----
What I would far prefer, though, is tech services system that companies can buy into:
Want your employees to be able to bus from SF to MTN VIEW: pay in and let them badge into that service.
Why should all the tech giants run separate services that are basically all the same routes? Let a company run that, and let ANY company add users and pay based on badging.
Let companies have a "groupon" of sorts for restaurants in their area, where the per-diem lunch allowance is spendable at any restaurant within a radius of the office. The employee will get a % of their meal paid for by the company, and they pay for anything they personally want over the base?
Allow for perks that are not walled to the campus/office/etc.
Heck, Path.com employees had a monthly Uber allowance they could spend...
This should be encouraged in Silicon Valley, to allow startups to share services at a discount which both provides revenue, data, testing, users, validation, etc....
There's a lot of value to Google in having everyone on a Google bus being a Googler. You can have sensitive conversations on the bus (also, your employees are less likely to jump ship due to meeting more interesting people...)
Google doesn't actually run the bus themselves; it's Bauer.
(I hate the SV culture of having sensitive meetings in public cafes and restaurants, especially ones frequented by all your most likely competitors! Internal compartmentalization is also a bad extreme, but having a hard "insider vs. outsider" boundary, and then specific short-term projects with their own borders, and all communications about those happening in secure spaces, is my default.)
Kind of funny how your statement is the exact oposite of the famous open office idea: "we have a flat mgmt structure and desks in an open office so the collaboration and free flow of ideas can occur!"
SHARED BUSSES!?!?? Wtf! Do we want tech employees sharing ideas and getting poached?!?! What is this communist Russia???
Uh. I want free flow of information inside the company, or of certain kinds of information between companies (or company and general outsiders). You absolutely do not want to share your most sensitive company discussions with your direct competitors. There's also some information which is regulatorially or legally sensitive and can't be shared outside the company before "everyone" has access to it.
Another source of daily irony is I dislike open plan offices in general as a developer; I'm now more a product manager (although I do tech stuff as well, and conference papers, and such), which is a role which does strongly benefit from open plan, and I've also we've built monitorhenge at a pod of desks in open-plan, out of Seiki 39" 4K and portrait-mode 24" U2410 monitors. It's essentially a re-creation of my favorite work environment; a private office shared with a small team.
> On the one hand, you want to provide perks that offset personal cost to your employees AND reduce the amount of time it takes for them to do something like lunch with the result in increased productivity (ostensibly simply due to removing factors such as travel-time-to-lunch-place).
Yes, it does make things incredibly convenient. No doubt about that.
But what about just doing it the way it's done in Europe? Where employers are required by law to be paid X amount per month for lunch, X amount of transit, and so on. Company gives you the money, you spend the money whichever way you feel.
I'm not against perks, I'm against hiding them behind some feel-good crap about how much free stuff you get. It's not free, it's part of your paycheck. And it's cheaper for companies than just paying you more, to boot.
I also like the idea of just having a conveniently located lunch place (internal or external business entity, doesn't really matter) that employees go to and pay for stuff with money. It can even be cheaper than going outside because said business has a guaranteed customer base.
Guess that's along the lines of your "allowance" idea. But even less wishy-washy.
PS: when you think about it, it's really kind of funny how all these perks and stuff that magnificent Silicon Valley companies offer their employees, are taken for granted in Europe because they've been there since workers' rights movements
But what about just doing it the way it's done in Europe? Where employers are required by law to be paid X amount per month for lunch, X amount of transit, and so on. Company gives you the money, you spend the money whichever way you feel.
That's called a "salary". The only difference between those subsidies (as we call them here in the European country I live) and regular salary is for tax purposes.
PS: when you think about it, it's really kind of funny how all these perks and stuff that magnificent Silicon Valley companies offer their employees, are taken for granted in Europe because they've been there since workers' rights movements
Europe's a big place. We certainly don't have on-site daycares, healthy food by a good chef, life insurance, concierge service, rental cars, gyms, buses with Wi-Fi and such. The only perk I can see is the maternity leave, which has a similar duration (120 days) but doesn't have gender discrimination, and probably the vacations.
There is this thing called public transit. It's where government takes tax money from all companies and their workers and subsidizes a train or bus to go into most neighborhoods and commercial areas... Some companies even provide transit passes to cover the unsubsidized portion. (And then get a tax break for doing so).
For restaurants, this exists in Europe. Your employer gives you a monthly number (around 20) of $10 vouchers that are accepted as cash only by restaurants (though there was a small black market for them). One that I saw in France is called http://www.groupe-cheque-dejeuner.com/en.html
One of my employers reimbursed my work-from-home expenses (ISP, extra landline, printer and toner), and I get to deduct my home office expenses from my income for taxation purposes (percentage of my habitation costs, proportional to the percentage of my office floor space).
Except for the fact it's nothing like that at all. The perks are free, and employees are generally paid well - when compared to other professions, if, perhaps not their value add.
The problem with the "company store" was that they paid employees less than their cost of living. And the store sold them items on credit, thus they could never leave the company. This hardly applies to Google or their peers unless you consider the pain of doing your own laundry and cooking your own meals as comparable to crushing debt; which it's not.
> "He thinks the lavish perks at many technology companies, especially the free on-campus meals, are a disguised form of mind control, designed to get employees to work 12- or 14-hour days."
I can't agree with this, and I have some experience with both sides of it.
I have worked at a company that does not provide much of anything in the way of perks (Amazon) and a company which is known for them (Google). I've NEVER felt pressured to put in more hours at Google, while at Amazon it was more or less a constant of existence.
As with all anecdotes, your mileage may vary, but I think it has little to do with the perks and more to do with broader company culture. At Amazon, the lack of perks and long hours become badges of honor that you share with your peers. Looking back on it, it feels rather toxic.
Funny how quickly things change when someone offers to hand you a lot of money. Granted, someone's opinions can change, but I feel like the first quote especially describes a personal philosophical value that wouldn't change on a whim.
The latter quote about the free food is just an ignorant comment. I'm sure once the guy talked to some actual Googlers and saw how it really plays out, his fears were assuaged.
(It's true that my free Google lunch keeps me at work around lunch time, but I don't feel pressure for me to work beyond the 38 hours a week they pay me for. In fact, Google has a lot of programs to help its employees maintain a good work/life balance. Of course there are crunch times, but I feel free to spend less time working at other times to balance it out.)
Salaried Google employees, officially at least, work a full-time schedule according to the local standard workweek, which varies by jurisdiction. That's 40 hours in the US/UK offices, 37 hours in the Denmark offices, 38 hours in the Australian offices, etc. And enneff's profile indicates he's in Australia.
Interesting. I know several Googlers in the SV area and none of them work on a 40/hr schedule like that. They work like a regular salaried person where they just do the appropriate amount of work to get their tasks completed on schedule. Sometimes they will have a relaxed week where they only work ~20 hours and other times they will be in a code sprint and do 60-70 hours.
I meant average, yeah, not necessarily that you work the same hours every week. However countries also vary a bit in how normal it is for people to work outside of a standard daytime, M-F workweek.
I think even in the U.S., it's only really in the Valley (and maybe also in NYC finance) where a regular salaried job has wild week-to-week variations in working hours. Occasional variations, yes, but in most industries it's expected that you'll work standard hours most of the time (e.g. 8-5, M-F), deviating only when there is some major issue. Every engineering company I've heard of works like that, for example. The main exception is that people do do quite a bit of email outside of work hours.
There are all sorts of practicalities that rely on a predictable work schedule: scheduling your carpool, arranging childcare dropoff/pickup, etc. How does that work in the tech industry? Do people at Google not have carpools, kids, etc.?
That's pretty much what I said. I work more in the crunch times, less in the slack times. But my variance isn't that wide. My working week is between 28 hours and 48 hours, but most weeks are just 38 hours.
Totally agree with you. So called perks like gaming consoles are a bit silly indeed, and would fit his point better. But food is different, as we all need to eat.
"Dropcam will come under Nest’s privacy policy, which explains that data won’t be shared with anyone (including Google) without a customer’s permission. Nest has a paid-for business model and ads are not part of our strategy. In acquiring Dropcam, we’ll apply that same policy to Dropcam too."
Looks like nothing will change about that straightforward business model.
While technically accurate that statement is really misleading. Nest makes a significant amount of revenue from utility companies who pay up to $50 per thermostat per year for Nest agreeing to turn down their usage during peak times.
This is a very different model than paying someone for a product. While you buy Nest's product, you are still the product (and selling you is a better business for them long-term).
Nest has only recently started operating in the UK so I don't think that any UK energy companies have yet jumped onto that bandwagon. But still I must ask for a source for your claim.
Does the owner of the nest have the option to override such feature? Just because I have a nest in my home doesn't mean my home is well suited to kill the heating during peak times. Yeah it might save me a few quid and the energy company a bunch more killing my heating during peak times. But I am not going to sit in a cold house just because the energy company decide what is best for me. If I can override it or disable it. far enough. But that is like your ISP killing your connection because everyone in your street is watching netflix at the same time you are trying to just have a few good irc take rooms open at the same time.
In a pay per use case (which most net connections don't) we are used to pay what we use. If I need my house heated because I am cold, I want to be able to heat my home.
Throwing a guess out there... I think this applies more to Air Conditioning usage in the US. I'm an expat in MA, my company sends out a few emails in the summer along the lines of 'we are reducing our energy consumption at the request of the power provider, all non essential lighting will be turned off and cooling systems tuned to 'optimal' temperatures'
this is to avoid brownouts. If I recall, the same does no happen in the UK other than everyone making a cuppa at a break in coronation st. (o;
You make no money when your system fails because it's overloaded. Also, most utilities need to purchase energy from other areas, at a significant premium, during peak usage days.
Most customers pay a fixed rate per kWh, but the cost to the utility is dynamic. When the grid is near capacity, electricity may be sold at an order of magnitude below its marginal cost to the utility.
Here in northern California, our utility (PG&E) is experimenting with "peak day" pricing. During peak hours of certain days, electricity costs increase by ~10x. In return we enjoy a lower baseline rate the rest of the year, encouraging us to shift consumption to off-peak hours. It's a great idea for everyone involved.
"Nest founder and CEO Tony Fadell told Forbes last month that his company had struck deals with close to 20 utility companies, who paid Nest $30 to $50 per thermostat annually, to manage the energy usage of Nest customers who had opted into their utility’s demand-response program.
As part of the program, Nest temporarily take over the healing and cooling of a homes for a set period, perhaps a few hours, and customers are notified that an “event” is set to happen some time beforehand. When Nest does this over multiple homes in a neighborhood or county it can, Fadell claimed, lower energy costs for utilities by 50%, by re-routing peak energy being used in empty homes.
“We know how many people are home during those times,” he said “We know which homes have cooling, we can go through the data and we can say we believe we’re a five megawatt power generator or 10 megawatts in this county. That’s what we can deliver – 50-60% of the energy that was consumed in that window has been shifted away.”
The services makes Nest a middle man for utility companies, meaning that Google itself will now play a role in managing energy efficiency programs across wide swathes of home and even counties – something that Google has been keen to do for some time."
This is pretty much why I wouldn't buy a Nest. I don't need a 3rd party knowing when I'm not home.
When demand exceeds supply, brown-outs occur which means a lot of unhappy customers and, considering utilities' monopoly status, calls for investigations.
Nest's demand response program is called Rush Hour Rewards. They have a good explanation of it on their website [1], but they claim that customers can opt out at any time, customers receive rewards through their electricity supplier.
From what I can gather from tweets by participating customers, they do it because it's cool and exciting not because of the financial rewards.
I have said this many times before - everyone's ethics has a price. You just need to find the price. (Yeah yeah, there are exceptions in history but I am talking of the norm)
I hate to be cynical, but I think this statement is a well calculated PR move to make people comfortable with one of the most invasive possible devices there is. You are giving Google access to an always-on camera in your house!
