Nest CEO and co-founder Tony Fadell announced he will step down from his leadership position, but will stay on as an adviser to parent company Alphabet. Fadell will be replaced by telecom vet Marwan Fawaz (formerly CTO of Adelphia Communications and Charter Communications), “amid escalating drama at Nest that sent ripples across all of Google,” suggests Recode. “Despite its internal struggles, Nest is a market leader in the connected device field.” Its ability to ship its collection of smart home products and “build out software and energy partnerships for Internet-connected devices” will be critical as it competes in this space with tech giants such as Amazon and Apple. Continue reading Tony Fadell to Step Down as CEO of Alphabet’s Nest Division

Retailers are gearing up to support a range of connected home devices for the upcoming holiday season. Best Buy’s new Connected Home department is scheduled to deploy in more than 400 stores by Thanksgiving, featuring more than 100 smart home products. Other big box retailers including Home Depot, Lowe’s and Staples have unveiled new programs and products in their stores designed for the connected home. We can also expect to see specialists and tech support trained in smart home products. Continue reading Internet of Things: Retailers to Promote Smart Home Devices

With Google’s vast resources, Nest CEO Tony Fadell is hoping to bring home appliances and consumer electronics together in a new line of sleek connected home devices. The plan is to develop a line of smart refrigerators, TVs, light bulbs, thermostats, smoke alarms, and security cameras that can all interact with each other. In typical Google fashion, Nest wants anybody to be able to connect to their hardware, so they released a developer program for other companies. Continue reading Nest and Google are Aiming to Design Smarter Home Devices

For homeowners with a variety of smart devices and appliances, operating within the Internet of Things can be complicated because many hardware makers manufacture products that do not work with devices from other companies. Wink, however, is a smartphone app that connects all of those products, from Samsung smart TVs to Philips Hue smart light bulbs. Earlier this week, Wink also launched a series of Wink-enabled devices from 15 manufacturers. Continue reading Wink App Controls Smart Devices from Different Companies

As part of its push to become the dominant OS for connected devices in and around the home, Google’s Nest Labs will purchase Dropcam for $555 million. Dropcam’s Web-connected video-monitoring service streams live to mobile apps and sends alerts based on activity in the home. Google acquired Nest, founded by Apple designers Matt Rogers and Tony Fadell, earlier this year for $3.2 billion. The acquisition of Dropcam is expected to generate privacy concerns. Continue reading Connected Home: Google’s Nest Agrees to Acquire Dropcam

Researchers at MIT have developed a method for teaching computers to understand what is happening in video content. The method uses a similar approach to textual analysis, such as natural language processing, by looking at each part of a video to figure out what the whole thing means. The researchers created an algorithm to identify what occurs in individual frames of the video, and then determines what those mean when combined in a certain order. Continue reading Researchers Use Algorithm for Computers to Understand Video