Google Nest

The companies on this list are mobilizing the creative tools of capitalism to help solve social problems.

CTW 2023-Google Nest

After coming out of early preview in the U.S. in 2022, Google Nest’s Nest Renew program has already helped customers prioritize renewable energy for more than 110 million hours. Through Nest Renew’s Energy Shift feature, users enable their thermostats to make automatic adjustments that concentrate their energy consumption during times when power is cheaper, or when the grid is relying on cleaner sources such as solar power. Nest Renew also offers users impact reports so they can judge how their energy use is affecting the environment and shift their behavior accordingly. With the Energy Impact program, Nest users can help direct funds to nonprofits that are working on expanding and promoting access to clean energy.

Change the World

Change The World

Impact Segment

Sector

Get insights into Google Nest including business profile, stock information, news, and rankings from Fortune.

Google Nest Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

legacy

google nest

Companies

Google Nest | Fortune

Google Nest Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Thanks, thanks everybody for having me. It's great to be here. Actually it's the first time I've been in this part of [ INAUDIBLE ] and I was just blown away but what I've already seen. It's a beautiful area. So let's see, I'm gonna whip through these. I've had the absolute honor and the luck to be able to Be a part of some great teams leading the iPad design and engineering at Apple. And then also iPhone was on that team as well. You might not recognize me, a little bit more hair then. But those are amazing, amazing products. And so I set out after that to say, okay Knowing everything about those products and designing experiences and learning about that from Apple, well what can we do to save energy? And so that was the next thing, which was Nest. Nest was all about not just making a cool thermostat, but it was about saving energy. Basically artificial intelligence inside A thermostat to turn it down when it's supposed to be cool. Turn it up when it's supposed to be hot. And turn it off when you are not using it or you are not in the house. We actually turned it out to be billions and billions and billions of kilowatt hours saved because of that technology. And that was great. It was amazing. And so it worked out well for us. It's actually a 10- year anniversary at our first First discussions about nest just last week. So that was nest. But energy savings wasn't just all just something that I thought of right then and then in 10 years ago, it's something I've been doing since I was a kid. So this is me and my science fair project when I was 11 or, 12 1981 and that's a solar back then in 1981 or two. So this has always been a passion of mine, the environment is made of passion. And so what we did was after nest, We created a company, a investment company with our money in it. And we have a team that's both based in San Francisco and in Paris called future ship. And we are investing in global changing companies for the environment. So obviously you can see the first company, they're one of them we've invested in over 200 Companies around the world, and we have hundreds of millions of dollars out on the street in investments today, and making two to three investments a month. The first company you guys are all gonna hear from a brilliant team with an amazing product, and it's going to be a blockbuster company. You're gonna hear from Pat just next. After that, Phononic. Phononic is a company that is replacing compressors in all freezing and refrigeration across the planet. It's already for sale. We're going to be revolutionizing all kinds of commercial consumer refrigerators and freezers. Another amazing company Third, out of that part we're creating diamonds from just simply methane and hydroelectric power. We're creating that so we're saving the planet from strip mining, from blood diamonds, from conflict diamonds. So these are the kinds of companies we invest in. And so I and the team, we are always looking for new things to help the environment, help our societies, help our communities, and so I decided after we were living in Europe as well as Silicon Valley. We decided to move our family, To Southeast Asia, we've been there for over a year now. And why are we doing that? We wanted to be where things are happening, where the developing world is becoming just like China went through its moment. What is going on at Southeast Asia? And so By being there and speaking on the ground, we're getting real, real data about what's happening in waste to energy in recycling in materials, and it's been absolutely fascinating. So I set out a year ago after starting to live and see this problem, see these problems around it, start to design products. That start to address these things or use some of the waste materials that are generated. Started looking and looking. And so for over a year now been investigating and learning all about the plastics issues. I want to create some new products. And I'm trying to find the most sustainable way to use plastics. And it has been fascinating to me to understand what's really going on after you scratch the surface and you get through a lot of the greenwashing going on in the petrochemical industry. And so it's been very, very intriguing. So we've all heard about the others tons of plastics in the oceans. There's gonna be more plastics in the Ocean than fish by 2050. We hear that over and over and over. That's right. It's absolutely true. It's going on but it's a lot worse than plastic is everywhere. It's in the air It's in the water we drink, it's in the food we eat, it's in our bodies, it's in every single place. We found it at the deepest parts of the ocean, we found it at the highest parts of the mountains. We found it in air, we found it in bottled water, we found it in our feces. It's everywhere, microplastics. And people were like well, the WTO just announced that well, we don't know if microplastics are bad. What we do know though is microplastics and nanoplastics absorb like sponges bioaccumulative toxins that get lodged in our body. And in no fact and it goes from generation to generation. So you might say we don't know if it's going to be harmful, but we can tell you it's in your body and it's soaking up chemicals now, toxins and they're going in your blood stream without a doubt. Well I remember when we talked about it for smoking, well we don't know if smoking is bad We still don't know if RF emission or your cellphones are bad. But we're learning more and more everyday but I can tell you this, it's in our environment and it's everywhere. So, first thank you, thank you China, thank you for not taking and importing our waste any longer. Thank you, thank you. Why? We have been hiding this problem for way too long. This plastics problem has been buried, it has been incinerated, and it has been moved. And the developed world has pushed it away and said, it's somebody elses problem. Thank you for making it our problem again. Because of the things that China did, and is doing, it has now forced many countries in Southeast Asia to do the same. I'm seeing it on the ground in Indonesia. They're kicking back. They're kicking back waste, Vietnam, Thailand, they're all kicking back the waste. This is important and thank you again, China cuz you're making us wake up to the reality of the trash we're creating every day. So, we all know coal right? It's bad. We shouldn't be making more coal plants, right? Everybody agree no more coal plants. Well, why the hell are we making even worse coal plants for plastic, oil to plastic? Coal to energy is three parts CO2 for every one part coal Plastic five parts minimally five parts to create PET plastic from one part oil. We are actually just in the production of plastics making more co2 than coal plants and we're getting rid of coal plants. So why are we making more coal plants? They just happened to plastic production plants. Look at the emissions. The emissions are growing and it's staggering. We're looking at over 600 new coal plants for plastic production between now and 2050. But it's not about CO2, let's put it this way. Plastics, yes, we do need plastics. We need plastics for certain applications. There are lots of great reasons why we need them. But there's one class of plastics, if you looked at it, packaging. If you look at that pink or red thing, it is growing exponentially. The other ones you can see the usage of them. If you look at real estate or excuse me real estate if you look at some of the other categories that we use those four years, plastics, packaging plastics are used for weeks or months, and it's growing like crazy. Why do we care about that? Because plastics are around four years, 500 years. Once they're created, they're around. No matter what people tell you about recycling, they still are around in our environment. The problem is multiple multi layered. Of course we have to extract the oil We create methane when we do that, that's a 20 times more powerful climate warming gas than CO2. 20 times more, and that stays in our environment at least 20 years. Next, we then create the plastic. the CO2 from that, just like we talked about the coal plant, is going to be around for 80, 80 years or so. After that, we're going to use those package. We're going to use the package, okay. There's all those durable ones I talked about. Those other ones that lasted, that we used for 20, 30 years. And Bill McDonald tomorrow's gonna have a brilliant talk all about that I'm sure because I've heard many times, he'll talk to you about what we do about those plastics that are in our environment and what we do about them when we use them for 20 years and we have to recycle them or do something. It's a great top but plastic packaging is only for day a days, weeks or months. After that it sits in our environment for 500 years. Think about what was going on in the world 500 years ago if they were using plastics, it would just be decomposing today. All right. 500 years, so a few months of use for 500 years of trash that goes in our body that's bio cumulative toxin sponges. Recycling, we all hear about recycling. Recycling is so important. Yes recycling's important but let's talk about what's really going on. We have all these different labels. We see them all in our packages but guess what. Just because the label's there doesn't mean anything. The first one we got here is we got sometimes recycled. So the first two categories are sometimes recycled. One in two. So between 6 %, 7 %, some as low a 2 %. Not even, in a lot of places 0 % is actually recycled. It's recyclable, but it's recycled. And most people won't tell you that when they are recycled They can only be recycled two, three, or four times, because they're mechanically recycled, and may go and become trash because those long polymers become shorter and shorter, as you just they grind them up and then they try to make more products with it. That's why you have to put it in a road, that's why you have to put it somewhere else. It's not true recycling like aluminum, or glass, or paper, in a lot of ways. It is still only partially recycled and even then it can only it turns into trash very quickly if it is recycled. After that, we have more and more categories. All of those other things are either never recycled or can't be recycled because they're toxic just because you see them. Just because you see those labels, does not mean you're going to see them recycled at all. So is this truly a waste management problem? Is this truly a consumer problem that we're lazy? It's too hard to separate these things. If you look, recycling is more about not the process of recycling. It's the process of sorting. And cleaning. That's the problem that we have. And consumers need simple things. We all know, we're in the business. When we make something, we have to make it incredibly simple. Consumers are good at two choices. Three choices, it gets difficult. Seven, eight, ten choices, even harder. We have made or the industry has made it incredibly hard for the consumers to try to do the right thing, and it's made it really hard to make for the recyclers to do the right thing. Recycling is not the answer for packaging. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So here's something you need to know a lot of people don't wanna tell you. Okay, you hear better recycling. I just talked about that. Well, no, it's not about better recycling for packaging. After that, you hear it's about what is that one? I can't even read it. Incinerate? Yes. We're gonna do waste to energy. We're gonna incinerate it. Well guess what? Those coal plants that are we talked about earlier, making plastic Well makes even more waste and toxic dioxins that are spewed out unless it's absolutely done right and it's very expensive to do it right. You cannot just incinerate it and waste to energy. ****. Next we got bio plastics. We hear everything about bio plastics. bioplastics are the answer. Well guess what? Bioplastics are the same thing as biodiesel. All we're doing is we're substituting one thing into another. We're just taking some biomass and turning it into petroleum. So it's kind of like going from coal and natural gas Something like that. But it's really not the answer bioplastics if it's not done right. Is not right. Next. So biodegradable or compostable. If you hear biodegradable, it doesn't mean it's good for the environment. Everything biodegrades into little pieces. Plastic biodegrades into nanoparticles, does it part the great into organic but nanoparticles that are sponges. If it's compostable, usually that means it needs to have industrial equipment to make it turn into something that's more like soil. It needs recycling. It needs collection. That isn't right. So what is the answer? Packaging needs to be bio- waste plastics, waste, from waste we turn it into plastics, and it needs to be consumer compostable. We can't just throw it in a compost pit. The organisms just eat it. We can throw it in the water, in the ocean, and it just dissolves into properly degradable Elements that do not hurt us and do not hurt the things we eat and live on this planet, bio- waste plastics and consumer compostables. So we need to build circular businesses. I don't need to go through this, we all understand that. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So, what does it mean if you are in a business Today. Right now you have to understand many countries are banning single use plastics. If you are in using them, creating them single use plastics are getting banned and very rapidly. All of Bali in literally three months has totally changed from single use plastics in many different categories. And those Single use plastic definitions are growing wider and wider. After that, we have to eliminate composite plastics that means layers of film. They put different types of plastics together they can even be recycled. Many of the plastic packages you see that have food in them, their composite, they can't even be recycled. Definitely not mechanically, food delivery. Food delivery in Indonesia is starting to get regulated. What can single use? What packaging can it be in? There's all kinds of regulations coming very soon for food delivery services and what they can use. We have to limit petrochemical infrastructure. We talked about incineration. And of course we have to make sure the producers of these things don't just leave it to the consumers to have to clean up their mess that they helped to create. Long term bio and biochemical recycling is necessary. And we need to have the proper value chain, which Bill will talk about tomorrow. So, the biggest thing to remember, if we want this world and packaging to work, we have to make it easy. We have to make it easy if we're going to recycle it, and today we don't have it. consumers need easy to make it work. And it's not that way today. So anyone tells you it's a waste management problem. They're lying, it's not true. Thank you very much. [ APPLAUSE ] Hey thank you Johnny. Thank you. Sasha tells me that we've got time for one, maybe one and a half questions. Sorry I took too long. No, it was time well spent, it was absolutely fantastic. So, one of the things I love about this, is it's a designer perspective, where you take a designers sence of empathy and look at the whole system. And you say that, things that aren't working, don't work for a reason. It's because they're hard to use and the user experiences isn't what it ought to be. And I love your focus on consumers, So my question for you is, making this switch that you say is the way to go so that it's easy for consumers. What drives that? How do we get into that world? Is that the responsibility of designers to come up with some new materials? Is it the responsibility of governments to regulate as you described it in Bali? Or does it fall back on consumers again, just not to us, I think it's all three. Look governments are going to step up because they're seeing and they're really realizing the problem that they're having before their societies and their constituencies are saying this can't go on and hunger because they're starting to wake up to all of these greenwashing terms that the industry is using just like they did for oil and gas and tobacco and those kinds of things in the past. So people are waking up governments are waking up. Consumers are definitely waking up. And there's a very interesting study that came out about a month ago, which said global brands today when they come out with echo anything yeah, consumers don't trust it. They can think They trust new brands that have come from scratch with eco products. They much rather go to that than try to go to a global brand that's been screwing up the world for a while and they don't belive that they're doing actual good. So where does this leave the role of companies? I mean, we heard from Jim [ UNKNOWN ] A very kind of nuanced perspective on the problems and how it's a systemic problem and how companies have to do their part. And it's partly consumer product companies end consumers. And then there are things that regulators and waste management companies can do. But are you saying that just don't trust companies in general because there's nothing really? No, I don't. I'm not saying that. I think companies can do a lot to help. I think we need to scale up PHA production. There's all kinds of biomaterials that are available now, that if done right at scale can actually compete with the petrol chemical industry, to get us these bio waste, consumer compostable materials. They're there. They just need to be embraced. It's just a whole different thing than what they're doing today, these large companies. The other one is, this is their job to actually, to clock forward and get new customers and not lose ones, and not lose their competitive position. So this is a reality. We have to wake up to it and we have to stop the greenwashing. And consumers are gonna vote, and so are the governments are gonna vote. It started in China. Thank you again for not taking the waste. It's gonna continue and roll through many, many countries Many consumers, this is not a trend that's going to change. I can accelerate. Can we look for something along the material side from future shape company are we are investing now in biochemical recycling, we're investing now in bio materials. We're going to have some really, really great announcements there and I hope to have some really cool Interesting new products around this area very shortly to announce Come back and let us know. All right, Tommy thank you so much Thank you. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

How We Can Kick Our Addiction to Plastic 

Environment

Nest founder Tony Fadell shares some bold ideas.


Voices systems like Alexa series more and more would become the way we communicate with our devices what we're witnessing is technological revolution since the iPhone. Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. >. This voices systems are the brains in our smart home devices that are made by [ UNKNOWN ] such as Amazon, Google and Apple. All three of these devices try to make our lives easier for what we do in the home. Whether it's cooking, running our lights, our security systems, playing music. But each one is also different. For example Amazon's Echo was terrific at integrating the smart home devices. Alexa turn on the living room light. Google, with it's Home, is a bit different. It seems to me a bit better at answering questions, it just seems the smartest of the home devices. What sound does a whale make? [ SOUND ] [ LAUGH ] Okay Google. What's the weather? Do babies dream? How do you nice to meet you in Spanish? [ FOREIGN ] So just ask Google Home a historic question, a trivia question, and in milliseconds the answer pops up. And I think that's because they've been developing their database. For years and their search capabilities. The Apple homepod has Siri embedded in it and you can use Siri to answer questions like you can with the other two devices. The advantage that the homepod has is that, it has high end speakers and it's great for playing music. [ MUSIC ] Tech companies like Amazon, Apple and Google think voice is the next big thing. They're spending by one estimate, 10 percent of their annual R & D budgets on this technology. So why is big tech investing so much money in this technology? Well it turns out, people like to use these smart home devices. To make their lives easier. It's a fierce competitive race and not of this tech giants are standing still. The Echo now comes with a screen called the Echo Show. Alexa, show me how to make gazpacho. Okay. Google just launched A Google home version with a screen as well. When smart home assistants have a screen it makes them more useful. You can now read your recipe that you've asked for. You can see song lyrics or you can even shop online. So these devices do have a purpose in the home that people find valuable. Over a hundred million of these devices have been sold worldwide so far, and the market's growing at almost 50 % a year. Today Amazon is the leader in the smartphone device market. That's largely because they were out first. They launched the Echo in 2014. But Google is catching up fast. In fact, in the latest quarter, it actually outsold the Echo. It's too early to tell who's gonna win this race, and it may be that more than one of these tech giants will prevail. One advantage that Google and Apple have, though, is that they have a huge installed base of mobile phone users Answers and these mobile phones can mesh nicely with our smart home devices. By contrast, Amazon doesn't. You have to download an Alexa app on your phone. It's an extra step, it puts Amazon at a disadvantage but don't ever count Amazon out. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

The Voice Assistant Revolution Has Just Begun

Tech

Apple, Google, and Amazon are all competing to have their voice assistants in your home. But who will win the race?

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to Fortune Tech Debate where we debate the issues of the day in two minutes. Today we're talking about the Amazon Echo Supremacy. All right, let's put two minutes on the clock. Take it away, Jeff. Wait, supremacy? Yes, supremacy, Amazon practically created this category. Okay, what we're talking about, I saw the report too, new report out today. Uh- huh. Apparently, Amazon Echo has got 70 % of the home [ UNKNOWN ] market. That's what I'm saying and These things are taking off. That's huge, that's vast majority territory. Yeah, and Google has got 23 %. Right, and there's no Apple and there's no Microsoft, right. It's basically a two horse race and the other one is way far behind. And here's where you're wrong. You know what they're not, they don't have supremacy, they have an early lead. What? And Google is gonna catch up. Here's why. I own and Amazon Alexa. Sure. And you know what she tells me most of the time? The answer. No, I'll say hey Alexa she says sorry I don't know the answer to that. Come on, this is an unfair criticism, Google's home is the same way, Apple, Siri enabled devices, are the same way. Microsoft's Cortana's the same way. No, no, no. This is a nascent category. Try them side by side, the Google device works better. Amazon, they market it better, the design's better and it's called Alexa, not Google Yeah. Good plan by Amazon. Yeah, sure. I wanna watch the procreation at home so Alexa's like a core market. But the point is Alexia is the name, the word band aid to most people. It's a brand name to most people. Everybody thinks about Alexia. They, They talk about, they don't even know that the project's named Echo. They talk about Alexa all day long, and the fact of the matter is you said Google's is better, let's talk about that. Amazon is really, really deeply integrated with- Google's got the answer, Google's got the answer. Once people come to know these products, They're going to want the one that works best and I'm curious Microsoft's got good AI. Yeah sure. Where is Apple? They're gonna come to market too. But people don't buy AI. They buy answers and solutions and when they buy the Alexa they buy commerce, the ability to order something and have it go right in through their Amazon account. That kind of integration is unmatched. How can you possibly compare that to Google? This isn't Amazon's bed and butter. This is Google's bread and butter. I think Apple Is better, I think Microsoft's better at AI. This isn't Amazon's bread and butter. This was the most popular winter holiday device on amazon. com. Early lead, early lead, that's all it is. No, look, even if Apple enters the picture, even if Microsoft enters the picture in this category, I'm sorry, but Amazon's got the lead for a while. But we're out of time, come to fortune. com for more tech debate. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Amazon Echo Is Dominating the Virtual Assistant Space

With 70% market share and Google far behind, can Amazon’s Echo stay on top?

Google Nest

Videos