Tony Fadell Quotes

I started designing the greenest the most connected home before the iPhone and the iPad.

When you think of technology that gets people excited - long lines at stores, enthusiastic reviews in the blogosphere, passionate evangelists - the first thing to come to mind probably isn't thermostats. Then, along came Nest.

Major power and telephone grids have long been controlled by computer networks, but now similar systems are embedded in such mundane objects as electric meters, alarm clocks, home refrigerators and thermostats, video cameras, bathroom scales, and Christmas-tree lights - all of which are, or soon will be, accessible remotely.

Founded by an ex-Apple employee, Nest devices do for thermostats and smoke alarms what the Mac did for PCs - Google Buys Nest made them relevant and far more valuable.

It can't be that difficult to build a great thermostat. So I decided to figure out: What would the thermostat for the iPhone generation look like? I got this bug. It really infected my brain. I kept thinking about it. This could be a cool product that matters and a cool product that has a great business.

I have been working with Hive, part of British Gas, on reinventing the thermostat. Now you can control your heating at the press of a button on your phone. As I say, design should permeate every part of society.

The lightbulb, the most humble and illuminating of all technologies, when combined with a network connection, transforms itself from being a bulb into a wake-up alarm, a mood alteration mechanism, and in some cases, a cupid's assistant.

Apple is developing a service called Home Kit that will allow people to operate gadgets like garage openers and thermostats through one app. In related news, please don't tell my parents about this. I can't be explaining this stuff every week.

My belief is that there will be very large numbers of Internet-enabled devices on the Net - home appliances, office equipment, things in the car and maybe things that you carry around. And since they're all on the Internet and Internet-enabled, they'll be manageable through the network, and so we'll see people using the Net and applications on the Net to manage their entertainment systems, manage their, you know, office activities and maybe even much of their social lives using systems on the Net that are helping them perform that function.

Google won't break into your home. You'll invite them in.

Ambient Devices is what I call part of the Third Wave of Internet devices.

The pace of digital innovation is astonishing. It's impossible to imagine life without the web, smartphones, social networks. And yet the consumer products and everyday objects all around us are still essentially dumb.

I used to tell jokes about Internet-enabled lightbulbs. I can't tell jokes about it anymore - there already is an Internet-connected lightbulb.

Our view is that Quark can make almost everything smart. We'll show you some things that you would never have thought could become smart and communicate.

Google has the business resources, global scale and platform reach to accelerate Nest growth across hardware, software and services for the home globally.

Most of Google's home technologies have failed to catch on in a major way.

The Internet of Things tell us that a lot of computer-enabled appliances and devices are going to become part of this system, too: appliances that you use around the house, that you use in your office, that you carry around with yourself or in the car. That's the Internet of Things that's coming.

I don't have a smart house. My house is very dumb.

I envision a world where our smartphone is central to our lives in a non-obtrusive and intelligent way.

Consider a clock thermostat, and set it so that you're not using energy when you don't need it, when you're out of your house.

Nest really came out of a process where I was trying to design the most connected and the most green home that I knew of. I was curious of just about everything that goes into a home and building a home.

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

In the smart home of the future, there should be a robot designed to talk to you. With enough display technology, connectivity, and voice recognition, this human-interface robot or head-of-household robot will serve as a portal to the digital domain. It becomes your interface to your robot-enabled home.

I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices.

Analog components don't 'scale' as well as digital components, but integrating them into relatively mature 28 nm platforms will accelerate the connection of everything from watches, personal healthcare, and home appliances to automotive, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, and industrial controls.