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And just like that, Google’s recently acquired Nest is now announcing that they’ve agreed to buy Dropcam for a whopping $555 million. The news comes after rumors of the acquisition a short time ago, bringing yet another hardware company into Google’s ever growing family. In a blog post, Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy sounded enthusiastic about the move (which still needs to be approved by regulators), saying Nest and Dropcam share a similar vision, and to expect great things from them in the future.
How long before we see Dropcams on the Play Store? We imagine it wont be long. It was barely 3 months after Google announced their Nest acquisition that the smart thermostat wound up on Google Play. More recently, we saw Nest Protect elbow its way back into the Play Store as well (after a small hiccup). You can learn more about Dropcam and the products they offer here.
Where is Google getting all this money? They don’t make nearly as much as Apple and yet Google spends more than 3x the rate on acquiring other companies. Shouldn’t they worry about how much they will end up wasting?
March 31, 2014 – “We completed another great quarter. Google’s revenue was $15.4 billion, up 19% year on year”, said Larry Page, CEO of Google.
… $3.45 billion of that was profit. I don’t think they’ve got too much to worry about.
That’s great news, but for how long. Their ad revenue profit is starting to slow down for the third year in a row. That won’t be good.
Thats exactly why they are jumping to home automation and other areas (robots, satellites, drones, self driving cars…) $555M for Google is change btw…
If Google is pulling in $15 bil of profit a year for the forseeable future, pretty sure they’ll be OK with the growth of ad revenue slowing down.
You have to spend money to make money… And Google has plenty to spend!
I love this. I look forward to getting these.
do you think its better than the canary? ( http://www.canary.is ) ?
I like the idea of dropcam but I would never be comfortable enough to trust a product like this to be fully secure. The idea that a stranger can hijack my feed into my home is just too much for me personally. I’d rather utilize a closed off recording system and playback the video later. No risk in anyone having a live feed into my home with that.
All that wiring. =.[
With a closed system? Oh I was talking about a simple nanny cam or something similar. Anything that isn’t networked.
Oh, I thought you meant you were going to have cams set up, but they would have been wired so that they couldn’t be hacked into.
I think you’re confusing wired cameras as all being networked. I could have wired cameras all over the house but without network capability they’re just closed off.
Sure, and when you’re away from home and check in on your phone or tablet….you give the NSA just a little more personal data…..not for me either….closed circuit it would have to be.
There’s a great feeling of security with non-networked situations isn’t there? Products like dropcam, as great of a product as it is, represents yet another example of that delicate balance of convenience v security of your privacy. Some go very far in either direction, I try to keep level as best I can.
If I can’t disable the cloud feature and access the camera directly by opening a port on my router, then I wouldn’t even consider one of those.
First time I learn of this product. Looks promising.
I’m looking for something to monitor my aging grandmother who lives alone.
I want her to be independent for as long as possible.
Going to an senior citizens home is the last thing anybody wants
I hope the computer vision soon gets to the point where it can scan for the current stock of groceries and medication in the house, and then send a driverless car to replenish the stock.
Google is all about computer vision.
Object recognition will soon advance to the point where everything in your house can be labeled.
You’ll probably first help teach it what things are.
In the meanwhile, this will help improve a more general database, so when you search for something on the search engine, you’ll get more precise images or videos, and they will accurately be labeled.
It’s like using speech recognition for Google search.
If there’s a mistake, you correct it manually with the keyboard, and the correction data is used for learning.
The speech recognition will adapt to you when you use it in search, or perhaps in Google Docs speech recognition.
These are all things that help you more specifically, but the correction data is being used to improve more general things like automatic captions in YouTube videos.
take a look at the canary ( http://www.canary.is )
“Computer vision algorithms analyze people, pets, and patterns
Machine learning algorithms improve the accuracy of security alerts over time”.
And there’s no monthly fee.
Thanks for the recommendation.
Always get a good laugh from people worried about people looking into their homes through webcams and other web enabled devices. Youre not that interesting, no one is. Unless youre a buxom blonde that gets naked in front of her cams without caring, no one is going to spend hours watching you mope around your house depressed and going on with your boring lives. Seriously if someone thinks im interesting to watch, have at it. I doubt it though.
Do you think they’ll be able to create something better than the canary ? ( http://www.canary.is )
I’m seriously interested in other people’s opinions…. do you all think this is better than the canary ? anyone?