Google / Nest is Destroying Dropcam
Author: John Honovich, Published on Aug 10, 2015
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Comments (29)
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Get a Canary....no fee....monitors temp and humidity....1080 camera !
$250......
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Paul Galburt
We have two Canaries (from the original crowdfunding) in continuous operation. Setup and operation are simple and useful.
This particular note on the Nest Cam caught my eye.
"By itself it won't even show you what motion was JUST detected. So I'll get an alert on my phone from the Nest app that motion was detected, I'll swipe the alert, and usually the live feed will take minutes to load with no way to see 20 second clip of what caused the alert."
This limitation would completely eliminate the usefullness of this type of camera to me. We use this feature constantly for pet monitoring.
Canary is an almost invisible product market-wise. It also has no hooks such as for IFTTT (at least so far). Too bad.
BTW, the siren is disconcerting loud - as it should be. I do wish the air quailty readotu was more quantitative - but maybe I am too much in geek land.
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Undisclosed #2
Nest should have acquired Canary. ;)
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ROSS Vanderklok
I keep getting messages from Nest to upgrade the app from my old Dropcam app to the new Nest app that state something along the lines of "the new NEST app does not have some of the functionality of the existing Dropcam app, but.." So yeah, I am not "upgrading" anytime soon!
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John Honovich
Google technically no longer owns / controls Nest, as of this afternoon.
This is not a joke, but they have created a new company, called Alphabet, that will own and control Google and other companies, such as Nest, as individual subsidiaries.
From the NY Times article on it, here is a breakdown of Alphabet's organization:
The Google founders declared, "the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands." On the other hand, those 'companies' will still report to the same basic owners, the Google founders.
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Brian Rhodes
Alphabet.com is a BMW-owned automobitive fleet management company. So maybe that's the next aquisition? I mean the whole company, not just the domain.
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Undisclosed #2
Larry Paige stepping down as CEO also.
The pessimist says that it is being done to insulate mother Google from the volatility that an owning an incubator typically has.
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Undisclosed #3
Well they have a sense of humour anyhow. .xyz is very close to HBO series Silicon Valley Hooli.xyz company strategy...the series is worth watching
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Jason Spielfogel
Good info. I was actually thinking of purchasing a few Nest Cams for my mom's house. Now I'll wait.
I'm also wondering when the market will be flooded with Chinese versions of the same, but for half the price. $129 a camera, while reasonable, seems high for the residential space.
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Rodney Thayer
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Sorry for the customers, glad to see the mythology of Google's perfection is again under discussion.
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Steve Russell
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Steve Russell
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Todd Morris
Steve, I like the Ring product a lot, it seems quite solid and could add a lot to a larger system like Alarm.com. But it seems like another point product that wants to be a company.
I stoped by the Ring booth at ISC and was confused as to why they wasted so much money on a big booth only to tell people they had no plans to support the pro market or channel sales (other than Amazon.) Did not seem to be a wise use of investor funds. Perhaps they just wanted to be next to Nest booth and let some google gold rub off ;-)
These one product companies seem to always have the same business plan Burn cash till you sell to a bigger company or bust.
I will continue to keep an eye on them as they clearly have some solid product talent.
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Mark Jones
This one oCO, I saw and tested the online version today. I will have to say, it is pretty easy to operate. The first year of storage is free and after a year, the fees are not too bad. http://getoco.com/us/
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Nicolas Heyman
I saw the oCo camera last week, but had not read up on it yet. It seems like every one of these on the consumer side is copying the dropcam model, but not improving on either the software or hardware, so the value proposition is confusing..., On the flip side, the enterprise people seem able to build a decent piece of hardware, yet the software seems to be a very difficult piece to solve for them.
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John Honovich
New article: We're hearing about troubles at Nest, the smart-home company Google bought for $3.2 billion: "Nest had an internal culture where it was "always crunch time" because of unrealistic deadlines and a hierarchical management structure."
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