14 DAY TRIAL // It’s been nearly three months since Google has acquired Nest Labs and the company is keeping its promise to help the company expand outside North America. The smart thermostat from Nest is now officially available in the United Kingdom.
“Europe was high on our list,” said Maxime Veron, chief of product marketing at Nest Labs. While the products have already been bought from all over the world, official expansion has been slow.
However, thanks to Google’s acquisition in January, the process has accelerated considerably, as Veron admitted.
Nest products can be used to track temperature and presence of smoke in the house. They use sensors and special algorithms to learn the behavioral patterns of the inhabitants and use the information to change the heating and cooling settings.
Most importantly, the device can be used remotely through a smartphone app, which can be great on chilly winter days when you want your home to be warmer than usual or during the summer when you really need to be able to cool off when you get home.
The smart thermostat does not come cheap. In fact, the device with free installation costs £179 ($300), while those who want to get Nest up and running faster will have to pay extra, namely £249 ($414). Considering that in the US, Nest costs $249, the price gap is considerable.
However, there’s an explanation for this, namely the extra hardware that Nest had to design to fit the product for British homes. The package comes with a separate controller that attaches to home boilers. This device took about a year to develop, but it was necessary for the company’s expansion plans since the energy infrastructure varies from country to country.
According to Nest, some minor changes would make the device work in France and Italy as well, which probably means they’re high up on the list of future expansion sites.
Following the Nest acquisition by Google, there have been a lot of concerns about data privacy. While the company’s leaders have promised that customer data was not part of any deal it had with Google, the distrust remains.
Many believe that now Google will also start learning home behaviors by accessing Nest data, on top of all the information it already had about individuals with Android devices, using Google apps or the world’s favorite search engine.