As Amazon , Apple and others tee up smart home strategies with apps, hubs and new devices , Google is also turning up the temperature, so to speak, on its own ambitions. Today, Nest — the smart home business that Google acquired for $3.2 billion a few years ago — announced at DLD in Munich that it would be expanding sales of its thermostat, camera and smoke alarm products in four more countries in Europe — Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain.
Nest Learning Thermostat’s will retail for €249. The Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarm will see for €119. The Nest Cam Indoor will cost €199; and the Nest Cam Outdoor will sell for €199, all including taxes. P re-orders start today with a targeted delivery date of mid-February, the company said.
The expansion is a long time coming for Nest, whose smart thermostats, cameras and smoke alarms are used in some 190 countries, but (up to now) have been only sold and supported officially in seven. (And even that rollout has been slow: the last country expansion, also in Europe, happened in September 2014 .)
Lionel Paillet, Nest’s GM for Europe, explained that the delay was deliberate — not the result of any clouds or controversy related to Google’s ownership.
(There is some backstory here: Nest has been the subject of some controversy over what, exactly, its future would be as part of the search and Android giant as it also looked to make its own-branded moves into the area of the connected home, specifically via its Google Home hub that competes with the Echo from Amazon. More immediately, in Germany, after the Google acquisition, Nest was targeted by German activists who created a spoof site that acted as a criticism of Google’s privacy policies. The site was taken down after legal threats.
