Recently, there’s been a lot of noise surrounding Nike and their Fuel Band wearable fitness tracker. According to a number of reports, Nike has laid off a great number of employees responsible for the Fuel Band. Of course, the sports giant has denied all reports, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping Nest, recently purchased by Google for $3.2 Billion, from courting those that worked on the Fuel Band project. As TechCrunch has discovered, it looks like the company that bought smart heating to our homes is looking to recruit some of the engineers that gave Nike the Fuel Band.
Members of the Nest team recently headed over to Beaverton, Oregon to hold a casual meet and greet with Nest. TechCrunch confirmed with a hotel in the area that Nest had booked one of their conference rooms 12:30 to 19:00 yesterday. According to a tipster that passed the info on to TechCrunch, the flyer pictured above was handed out to those that had worked on the Fuel Band team and that the meet and great was an “impromptu interview” of sorts for former Nike employees. Speaking about the team, the tipster said that “Nest were very cool and nice. They have big plans for future products and need as much talent as they can get.”
We’re not sure what those plans are, as Nest currently deals in devices meant for the home, and Fuel Band is very much a mobile piece of technology. Of course, now that the company is owned by Google, there’s potential for Nest to be setting their aim on new hardware and considering that Tony Fadell is the man behind the iPod, we wouldn’t be surprised if Google was beginning to leverage Nest’s talent to produce new hardware for the search giant. More than anything though, it’s nice to see Nest reach out to quality talent like those from the Fuel Band team, especially if they actually have been laid off by Nike.