Nest surprised many with the launch of its long-awaited API and developer program prior to the start of Google I/O this week. The announcement includes the availability of the API through a comprehensive integration platform and a handful of initial integration partners.
Nest imagines a day when your house starts targeting your preferred temperature as soon as you’ve awakened, even though it’s much earlier than you’d normally get up. Your garage door, your phone, your remote control, …and even your car help your home optimize your HVAC and appliances’ energy use while adjusting lighting and notification settings to bolster security. If you do go out, you can rest assured that your home will be just the right temperature when you return. And if you’re a tinkerer, you can define your own conditions for controlling the devices in your home, based on Nest’s knowledge of your proximity.
This can all happen with Nest’s new Works with Nest program, and it can all happen today with services from the partners Nest announced as being immediately available—partners like Mercedes, Jawbone, LIFX, Whirlpool, Google, Logitech, and IFTTT.
Your Nest thermostat and Nest Protect aren’t just isolated components anymore—they’re the brains in your house that react to input from other devices to know what’s going on in your home and command other devices to behave accordingly. In a sense, your Nest network becomes a something of hub—something that perhaps too few of us saw coming.
Of note is that Nest’s premiere announcement partner from CEDIA, Control4, isn’t in the mix yet. When Control4 promoted their upcoming Nest integration back in Fall 2013, many assumed they’d be first out of the gate. Nest’s strategy, however, seems to have been to roll out a multi-pronged consumer devices platform, while Control4’s blog talks about release cycles and testing in a way that suggests they might have been left out of Nest’s inner circle.
This announcement marks an important shift for Nest—one that we’ll be excited to watch, test, and report.
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