iPod father Tony Fadell shows off latest gadget--a thermostat

At Nest Labs, former Apple product engineers Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers have molded their thermostat with many of the design and technology characteristics of Apple products like the iPod and iPhone. SmartPlanet's Sumi Das visits the startup to see what they've been up to and finds out what Fadell--who oversaw the design and production of the iPod--learned from Steve Jobs.


I'm Thomas Meyerhoffer and I'm a designer.

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>> I used to work for company called IDEO, a big consult firm and then I went from there to Apple where I was part of the design group and then I started my own company. For me, it's about creating a story in the end for the user so that the user will have a good experience with the product. One of my big priorities right now is surfboards. The surfboard I designed is quite radical for that audience. The design of the board looks like a peanut. Basically what I've done I had gone in taking a large board, the long board, and taking a way as much material as possible for the long board to still perform as good as a normal long board but then bring in the ability of a short board into that design. That means taking away the middle of the board, making a rounder tail where you stand which makes the board turn a lot easier in the waves. So it's kind of a combination of two designs into one.

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>> Another project that I'm working on, it's called the WikiReader and it's a kind of a low technology. So we took one of the most simple things from the internet which is the Wikipedia information and we put that on one device. Everything in the device is designed to take as little power--be as efficient as possible. You don't have to charge it. I mean that's three and a half million articles from the Wikipedia in this device and you don't have to do anything. You can bring it everywhere. For me personally, I just want to keep doing what I'm doing. I think the most challenging part is to make the right decision. It's not difficult to be creative. It's not difficult to come up with new ideas. I think its understanding what you are doing in the context of what's needed and where you need to go so that you take in the right turns and go on forward.