Google to Relaunch Nest Protect - Analyst Blog

The world's largest online search engine, Google, announced that Nest Labs, which it acquired recently, will again start selling Nest Protect — a smoke and carbon monoxide detector — in a few weeks' time.

Though the company has not specified a date, it stated that the product, after some software update, will hit the market soon as no unwanted incidents have been reported yet.

Last month, the company announced that it would stop selling the product over safety concerns. The product featured Nest Wave allowing users to turn off the alarm with a wave of their hand. A test revealed that the smoke detector misinterpreted any unintended movement as a wave, thus disabling the alarm in case of a real fire. Therefore, in order to prevent any accident, management offered automatic deactivation of the feature on all smoke detectors.

Google acquired Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash earlier this year. Nest Labs designs and manufactures sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-enabled, self-learning, programmable thermostats and smoke detectors. It was co-founded by former Apple AAPL engineers, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, in 2010. This deal was the second largest in Google's history after the 2012 acquisition of Motorola.

Google has been exploring various ways to diversify its revenue base and counter competition from the likes of Facebook and Yahoo YHOO. The company has been extending its foothold in new areas ranging from high-speed Internet access business to advanced research on self-driving cars and robotics. Acquisitions have been a key tool to accomplish its goal of increasing the demand for its web features.

Some of its recent acquisitions include Divide, a cloud-based mobile device management company that helps enterprises manage Android mobile devices; Quest Visual, Word Lens translation application maker, which translates words in print from one language to another in real-time without data connection, and Stackdriver, a start-up that offers cloud application monitoring services.

Currently, another stock that are performing well include LivePerson Inc. LPSN and OmniVision Technologies, Inc. OVTI, both sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

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