Revolv Acquired by Nest/Google

General Discussion
1

This market just got a lot more interesting. Lets see who iterates the fastest.

2

Wow. I find this to be pretty interesting…

"And it’s really the team that Nest is after — it’s immediately discontinuing Revolv’s product, which was sort of a smart home Rosetta Stone that connected devices from multiple brands across multiple radio standards, from ZigBee and Z-Wav to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. "

3

Wow!

4

Interesting. We’ll have to keep a close eye on this

5

it sucks for the revolv user that they $300 investemen in their hub is now out the door. Happy how Samsung did it with Smartthings

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6

Revolv = No Backbone

Smartthings = Got our back

7

seems they are keeping the service up and running and will offer support. Just no more sales

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8

I think this might help some folks around here with there prospective on Samsungs acquisition of SmartThings. People acted like the acquisition was the worst possible outcome for ST’s, which we now see that ST’s got a way better deal with Samsung then they would have with Nest. We’ll never know but I have a feeling this deal was probably offered to the SmartThing’s team as well, good thing they got our back!

9

I sure am glad I didn’t purchase Revolv. I was seriously considering it over the smartthings hub. With that said, I hope nest /google still allows integration. Revolv, supposedly had excellent integration with dropcam, nest and nest protect in comparison to smartthings.

10

I had the Revolv & SmartThings hub and just sold the Revolv before this announcement. Revolv was a glorified remote, no automation at all.

11

Sort of surprising that they are closing it down but not after you read statements like this:

Here’s how Nest co-founder and VP of engineering Matt Rogers put it in a phone interview today. “We are not fans of yet another hub that people should have to worry about. It’s a great team, an unbelievable team. There’s a certain amount of expertise in home wireless communications that doesn’t exist outside of these 10 people in the world.”

http://recode.net/2014/10/24/nest-acquires-home-automation-hub-revolv-but-will-stop-selling-it/

12

I’m not seeing the gameplan here. Are the looking to make the Nest a hub? Also, what does this mean for API access to Nest?

13

I’m thinking that they’re going to try to stick the guts of a Revolv hub inside of one or more of their more expensive products. A NEST already has some of the radios now, the next generation could have more of them. Then, they could try to do something similar to SmartThings and have all of the logic sit on their servers.
Revolv doesn’t have a lot of brains, but it certainly can glue a bunch of devices together.

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14

How interesting… I wonder what Google is planning.

15

Sounds to me they are going to put the hub logic into a new version of their existing devices: Nest, Chromecast or Google TV and leverage the expertise of the Revolv staff.

16

Dunno… but it would be refreshing to see a service from an outfit with the expertise to keep it running.

Unfortunately, if it all “revolvs” around the Nest, I may not bite. I don’t ‘get’ the Nest. It seems to be designed for those with regular schedules, and that’s not me.

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17

I think the big players, Google and Apple (and eventually Microsoft) want to go “hubless” and focus on peering based IoT with a cloud based coordination.

Conceptually it works much better, but creates a lot of problems yet to be solved.

Zwave and Zigbee are last years standards, these guys want to create a new standard and will take years to get devices talking with each other without some sort of hub to translate.

Hubless, app based HA and IoT will be a long and winding road. Keep in mind google mail gmail was in beta for years before they “released” it.

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18

Yeah, but Google’s betas are long because they throw it out there half finished to see what sticks, and what people hate. Gmail worked well long before release. So did Google Voice (wait, is that still in beta), and Map’s Navigation is still in beta. (c;

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19

Revolv is a box of good radios with not much brains. Google has a pretty good track record with cloud based software and is so-so with hardware. Now that they’re gobbling up decent pieces of hardware (NEST, Dropcam, Revolv), they are starting to have a lot of the ingredients.
They just need to put them together correctly. That’s a lot easier said than done. The tech world is littered with failed efforts to cherry pick and glue together “integrated suites” of products/services. Microsoft’s many dabblings, AOL/Time Warner, Yahoo’s numerous efforts all spring to mind.

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20

So a total peer to peer system? Seems like it will still need a mesh to extend the network.

Powered devices have WiFi and Bluetooth and battery powered only low power Bluetooth? Bluetooth would be meshed?

This may be the future but seems too far out to do anything now. SmartThings will get all the installations while Google searches for the “Holly Grail.”

I think the “expertise” they acquired from Revolv is knowledge of device object logic (classes, etc.).