While Nest themselves are the company purchasing the WiFi Camera company Dropcam, essentially Google owns Nest so you could look at it as Google buying Dropcam. We know that Nest continues to operate as their own entity however so Dropcam will likely operate much in the same way as part of Nest. Nest’s acquisition of Dropcam for $555 Million is nowhere near what Google spent to acquire Nest, but Dropcam is a much smaller company so that makes sense.
The first thing that most people are probably thinking about right now is “great, now Dropcam will begin to carry ads”, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. As Nest has steered clear(and will continue to do so)of operating their equipment with ads, so to will Dropcam according to Nest’s Matt Rogers. Dropcam is one of the more popular selling security camera setups on Amazon, and should make a nice addition to the Nest team. As Matt Rogers(Nest’s Founder and engineer)states, Dropcam will moving from their offices in San Francisco to Palo Alto, California where Nest is currently located. The niche with Dropcam is that it offers a cloud storage service to those who own their hardware products. Basically, the Wifi enabled cameras can connect up to the cloud and save(backup)security video footage to Dropcam’s cloud storage servers so that it can be accessed at a later point. Nest already has a hand in people’s homes through it’s smart thermostats and smoke and CO alarms, so it’ll be interesting to see what they have in mind for Dropcam when things are all said and done.
The deal has yet to be completely finalized but the signing has been made as of today and officially marks the fusion of two(or three depending on how you look at it)companies who share a vision for bettering the Home experience through meaningful products and services. It’s unclear at this point what will change for Dropcam, at least in the long run, but for now things will stay the same. Dropcam customers will still be able to use their Dropcam accounts in the meantime and the products will continue to be sold online and in retail locations. At some point though ,we could begin to see Dropcam come the devices section of Google Play, and start to see the more “Googley” side of Dropcam integration with our mobile devices.