I saw the news scroll by on Friday and did a double take: Nest is buying Dropcam for $555 million, all cash. Not stock, not some earn-out structure spread over four years, just cash, up front. For a company that makes a $199 wifi camera and charges you $10 a month if you want more than a week of cloud storage history.
If you dont know Dropcam, its the little white cube that sits on your bookshelf and streams video of your living room (or your dog, or your baby, or, lets be honest, mostly nothing) to your phone. Its a good product, from what Ive read. I almost bought one last winter when we were traveling for two weeks and wanted to check on the cat feeder. Ended up going with a cheaper knockoff off Amazon instead because $199 felt like a lot of money for something that mostly just sits there blinking at an empty room.
And now Dropcam belongs to Nest, which of course belongs to Google, which bought Nest back in January for $3.2 billion. So this is Google's camera company now, twice removed.
Heres the part that actually bugs me a little. When Google bought Nest, there was this whole song and dance about how Nest data, your thermostat schedule, when youre home, when youre not, would stay walled off from the rest of Google. Wouldnt get used for ad targeting. Tony Fadell said as much pretty directly in interviews at the time, and I mostly believed him, or at least believed it enough not to rip my own Nest thermostat off the wall (we put one in two summers ago and it is, for what its worth, genuinely decent at not running the AC when nobodys home).
But a thermostat knowing your schedule is one thing. A camera pointed at your living room is a different animal. Dropcam cameras dont just log when you come and go, they see you. They hear you too, if youve got the audio turned on. And that whole company now sits inside the same org chart as the people who make their money selling ad impressions.
Im not saying anyone at Nest is quietly piping your baby monitor footage into an ad auction, thats not the complaint. Its more that "trust us" gets harder to say with a straight face the second time you ask people to say it, and the second time is exactly where we are now. Every acquisition like this stacks one more "just trust the privacy policy" on the pile, and eventually piles like that fall over.
Dropcam is apparently staying in San Francisco and running semi-independently under Nest for now, which is the story every acquired startup tells for about fourteen months before the founders quietly leave and the product folds into whatever the parent company is building next. My guess is Dropcam stops being its own brand sometime next year and just becomes a feature line inside Nest hardware.
Unrelated tangent, but I had the World Cup on with the sound off most of yesterday afternoon while trying to write this, and losing to Germany 1-0 and still advancing out of the group on goal difference has got to be one of the stranger ways Ive ever watched a team celebrate not winning a game. Soccer math is its own weird little universe and I dont fully understand it even after having it explained to me twice on Twitter. Not related to Dropcam at all, just wanted it written down somewhere.
If youve already got a Dropcam sitting on your shelf, nothing changes today, it still just streams video to your phone same as last week. Im filing this one away as one more reason Im in no hurry to put an internet-connected camera anywhere in my house, knockoff or otherwise. The cat feeder remains unmonitored. I have made my peace with that.