Google Buys Nest From Alphabet…But Why?

It’s always fun to speculate every time Major Corporation A buys Huge Technological Thing from Major Corporation B, especially since so much of the reasoning depends on top-secret, forward-thinking projections that neither corporation can make public due to investor considerations. So, that makes Google’s purchase of Nest from Alphabet all the more interesting.

Glass Nest users will be able to control the Nest thermostat by voice commands, even remotely.

Glass Nest users will be able to control the Nest thermostat by voice commands, even remotely.

Wait, what? Alphabet IS Google, and they came up with Nest in the first place!

Not exactly. Google still exists under the umbrella of Alphabet, and it’s making a killing as the search-engine-plus-web-advertising arm of things. Yes, Nest existed before Google restructured to include Alphabet, and to make things even more confusing, Google bought Nest Labs in 2014 for over $3 billion. Now, however, Google has bought the rest of the deal, Nest Developers, from Alphabet and brought it over to its own side of things.

So here’s where the interwebs are going nuts with speculation. First, it’s that the under performance of Nest is due to some angst within the company, specifically in some of the leadership, so they’ve packed their things and walked across the street to work with a different team in the company. Probably not an incredibly likely scenario, but one that could have a hint of truth to it.

More likely is the excitement some industry watchers are currently feeling over Google Home, the company’s attempt to compete with Amazon’s Echo. But the beauty of Echo/Alexa is that Amazon lets others do the legwork for them. Lights, thermostats, shopping lists, reading aloud from your Kindle, the ability to tell you where your phone is if you laid it down somewhere, etc…those are things that outside developers have created to work with Echo.

Google has its hands full trying to create something that will compete, but it carries one very big burden on its shoulders: data gathering. As it turns out, consumers are a little wary of having the search engine giant track everything they do in the privacy of their own homes (hey, we saw Terminator 2! August 29th will forever be the date that SkyNet became self-aware!). By bringing Nest under Google and the team behind Google Home, the company very well be creating something that can actually compete with the hundreds of people developing for Echo.

 



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Syncios Manager 5.0.8

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Sheep View: Where there’s a wool, there’s a way

Over the past three months, Durita Andreassen and a few friendly sheep equipped with solar-powered cameras strapped to their woolly backs set out to collect imagery of the Faroe Islands for Street View. The 18 Faroe Islands are home to just 50,000 people, but — fittingly for a country whose name means “Sheep Island” — there are 70,000 sheep roaming the green hills and volcanic cliffs of the archipelago. So when Durita decided to document the country for Street View, sheep weren’t a baaad place to start.

Sheep View 360

When we herd about the Sheep View project, we thought it was shear brilliance. So we decided to help the Faroese by supplying them with a Street View trekker and 360 cameras via our Street View camera loan program. Last week, the Google Maps team arrived in the Faroe Islands to help train and equip the local community to capture even more (but slightly less woolly) Street View imagery.


Now that the Faroe Islands is supplied with a Trekker and 360 cameras, residents and tourists can assist the sheep in collecting Street View imagery of their beautiful lands using selfie-sticks, bikes, backpacks, cars, kayaks, horses, ships and even wheelbarrows. The Visit Faroe Islands office in Tórshavn and Atlantic Airways at the airport will be lending out Street View 360 cameras to visitors willing to lend a hoof.


The Faroe Islands have shown us that even sheep can contribute to Street View. If your hometown or favorite hiking trail hasn’t made it into Google Maps yet, grab your own 360 camera or apply to borrow one from us through our Street View camera loan program. We’re excited to see what ewe map!




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[Tip] Disable Modern UAC Prompt and Credential UI in Windows 10

http://ift.tt/eA8V8J Microsoft is trying to modernize each and everything present in the Windows 10 OS and in that attempt, Microsoft has made many changes and improvements to the recently released Windows 10 Anniversary Update to transform many UI elements into modern (aka metro) UI. You might have noticed that in Windows 10 Anniversary Update and later […]

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http://ift.tt/1JJCZGS KiTTY is a fork from version 0.63 of PuTTY, the telnet/SSH client. The app has numerous technical features including the ability to add automatic passwords, run automatic commands and you can run locally saved scripts on remote sessions, which is really useful. KiTTY has a very easy to use GUI with individual session icons and config box. The app ...


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[FIX] Account Picture Error Code 0x80070520 in Windows 11

If you are getting “Account picture error, this picture couldn’t be saved” message with an error code 0x80070520 while trying to change your...