A case of owning a set of patents for what's potentially mainstream tech? Other than that....

Designer? The guy behind Nest is the guy behind Thema iPod and iPhone designs...

While shoring up its hardware business is likely a key motivation for its acquisition of Nest, Google still makes nearly all its money based on an oft-repeated maxim (though not by Google): You are the product.

The value Google sells its customers — that is, advertisers — lies in its peerless understanding of our online behavior.

Google knows what we search for, so it can sell advertisers the eyeballs of someone who has already stated some interest in what they sell. Google reads our Gmail — anonymized, of course — and can target us with ads based on what we appear to be discussing in our private conversations.

One area of human behavior Google has yet to colonize as successfully is what we do when we’re not directly interacting with a screen, whether on a PC or mobile device. That in theory changes with Nest.

In answer to the question of whether Nest will share its customer data with Google, the company reportedly said it’s standing by its existing privacy policy, which “clearly limits the use of customer information to providing and improving Nest’s products and services.”

But even anonymized user data would give Google incredible new insights into our behavior in the physical world that its vast roster of very smart people could figure out how to leverage in order to advance its business.

Perhaps Google could pair our movements with how we shop — say, using Google’s own same-day delivery service. Or some choice we make offline that compels us to perform a particular search.

This may sound creepy, but much like using Google for search, it could become the price of admission for participation in the internet of things. Every choice we make using connected devices leaves a trace. And no one is better than Google at figuring out how to turn those traces into dollars.