Rohit Bhargava | USA Character Blog http://www.characterblog.com/ Celebrating the people, places and things that are positively impacting American culture. en Copyright 2012 Tue, 08 May 2012 08:30:00 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Nest: Reinventing the Thermostat As the seasons finally shift, chances are you'll shift from heating your home to air conditioning. Imagine if you could save energy and adjust the temperature based not on setting up a complicated series of dates and times, but by having your thermostat learn how to set itself. When Tony Fadell--who led design for the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone--redid his home, he was completely unsatisfied with the quality of the thermostats on the market, so he invented his own.

The result is a new thermostat called Nest that completely transforms the way that you control the energy used to heat or cool your home. Equipped with a sexy new round dial-style design, the thermostat uses WiFi to learn the temperature of your local area based on your zip code. It then adjusts itself based on this and also your behaviors over the first few weeks as you steadily "train" it to your preferences. And in case you want to control it yourself, there is an iPhone app so you can set (or reset) the temperature from anywhere that you happen to be.

For turning something that many of us have been living with into a new product that early customers can't live without, Tony Fadell and the Nest thermostat are Character Approved.

[Image: Vijay Sarathy via Nest]

]]> http://www.characterblog.com/2012/05/reinventing-the-thermostat.php http://www.characterblog.com/2012/05/reinventing-the-thermostat.php New Today Technology / New Media nest Technology/New Media thermometer Tue, 08 May 2012 08:30:00 -0500