Nest, a company formed by former Apple employees, reinvented the thermostat and continue to innovate and reinvent other household appliances. Their new thermostat is internet-connected and more energy efficient because Nest learns the behaviours of their owners.

Recently, Nest announced that they are introducing a new smoke alarm that also is internet-connected. Nest hopes this smoke alarm prevents house fires because many deaths have been linked to forgetting to put back batteries in the alarm when a smoke alarm goes off during cooking. Many owners view smoke alarms as an annoyance because they often go off during cooking and is a hassle to change the batteries.

Their new smoke alarm is hoped to help owners rather than annoy them as it comes with many features. Their alarm first begins with a “pre-alert” before sounding the full alarm. As well, their alarm has a motion sensor and if it goes off during cooking, owners can just wave their hand at the device so the alarm will not sound. Another feature included in this alarm is a motion-activated night light. There are also smartphone apps that alert owners when an alarm has been activated and if the batteries in the alarm is low.

This is a perfect example of a company innovating and expanding their products. Nest’s founder Matt Rogers has said that the company will continue to reinvent overlooked gadgets like they have with thermostats and smoke alarms.

Links:

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-nest-hopes-to-reinvent-smoke-alarms-like-it-did-with-thermostats-20131007,0,5299289.story

https://nest.com/ca/

In this day age, our phones know everything about us. This information is particularly useful to advertisers and tech companies such as Google and Facebook. With this information these companies can place ads targeted to each specific phone user. This has brought up privacy issues since consumers do not realized that their private information is being tracked.

Drawbridge is a company that tracks an individual’s “behavioral patterns” on all the devices the individual uses.  For example, if someone clicked on a link from an ad on his/her phone and later opens this link on his/her laptop or tablet, Drawbridge would alert its partners about this. Then Drawbridge would advertisements congruent to the individual’s interests.

But is this too far? Another company that specialises in personalized advertisements, Flurry, stated that they had even more specific data on users but does not use it because of privacy concerns. Should more users be aware of this and what would the effects be of knowing that their information is being tracked so closely? Or are users happy that they have useful ads that actually apply to their lives?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/technology/selling-secrets-of-phone-users-to-advertisers.html?src=recg&pagewanted=all

Over the past few years the use of DVRs has increased and has subsequently changes how viewers watch their television. There has been a surge in watching television shows days after its release date compared to watching television shows live. For example, Fox’s new television series “Sleepy Hollow” attracted a rating of 3.4 among adults aged 18 to 49 one day after its premiere. But after adding digital video recorder playback a week after the premiere, the overall rating became 5.8.

This delayed viewing has had a great impact on ratings for networks such as Fox and CBS but advertisers are not paying networks for the viewers that watch the shows later. Therefore networks are not being compensated for ads viewed past one week of the episode’s airdate. To solve this problem, networks such as Fox has video-on-demand, VOD, which plays episodes with fast-forward disabled so viewers must watch advertisements. Networks prefer customers to view shows this way so that they can be compensated for advertisements but this method is used less than DVR.

To encourage viewers to watch shows through VOD, Fox and CBS are running ads to promote using VOD to customers but this will strategy work? Or should Networks encourage advertisers to make more thought provoking and engaging ads so viewer do not skip ads when watching on DVR?

Links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/business/media/dvrs-shift-tv-habits-and-ratings.html?pagewanted=2&ref=media&pagewanted=all