Intel Corp (INTC)

[morrowinder]

Tim May: IOT really does have some interesting possibilities...

I have the NEST which is one of the more useful IOT devices. Now I agree with you about the watches but the NEST uses some interesting technologies. It learns what temperature you like and automatically programs itself based on what time you adjust it and how much. It gets automatic updates, so it enabled a new airwave feature early on for me that kept the fan running and the conditioner off at the end of an AC run to take advantage of the residual cold on the AC. There is no "programming" the nest, you just use it.

I also think you are missing that these things all have sensors. The NEST has a humidity sensor and a motion sensor as well as the obvious temp sensor. So whereas I used to have to make sure to turn off the heater/AC when I left home the NEST automatically goes into away mode and keeps things off when it fails to sense motion for 5 hours or whatever it is. But it is intelligent enough to keep things above certain threshholds in the event things go below a set degrees(I think it is 50 degrees or something like that). If I were worried about it I could log in to my NEST account and see what its status was or use my cell phone with an app.

It also plugs in to a cloud service that measures your energy usage and matches that up with the actual weather data so that you can see if it was hotter than usual and you used more or cooler and granted I am thinking from the always sunny California perspective:) It is actually a useful and well thought out device.