Nest gets closer to world (or at least home) domination with improved compatibility

Home / News / Nest gets closer to world (or at least home) domination with improved compatibility

Smart thermostat and smoke alarm maker Nest has just added a new crop of products to its compatibility list – and in the process moved one step closer to world domination. Or domination of your home, at least.

The Google-owned company announced that it is now compatible with some of the most popular home automation services around. Products from Crestron, Control4, Universal Remote Control and Remote Technologies Incorporated will work with Nest’s equipment, and that means professional installers can start incorporating it into their businesses.

The Nest-owned Dropcam is now fully compatible with Nest

Nest also announced that Dropcam, the cloud-based video-streaming camera (recently acquired by Nest), is now compatible with the Nest Protect alarm and Nest Learning Thermostat. If you have one or more Dropcams installed in your home and the Nest Protect goes off, they’ll automatically record and save a clip of the incident that you’ll be able to view from anywhere in the world. Likewise, if you set your Learning Thermostat’s status to “Away”, all the Dropcams in your home will automatically switch to motion detection mode, so you’ll be sent an alert if someone – or something – is plodding around inside.

Nest was bought by Google last year for US$555m (£345m), and looks to be a vanguard in the company’s attempts to become a central player in home automation and the Internet of Things. Some people see easier home automation as A Good Thing, while others believe scary old Google is using Nest as a Trojan Horse to monitor us inside our houses, collecting yet more info on our habits. We live in interesting times, that’s for sure.

[Source: Nest]

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Tech journalism's answer to The Littlest Hobo, I've written for a host of titles and lived in three different countries in my 15 years-plus as a freelancer. But I've always come back home to Stuff eventually, where I specialise in writing about cameras, streaming services and being tragically addicted to Destiny.