The new year is almost here, and that means it's time for the bi-annual Google Tracker, our roundup of all of Google's news, rumors, and acquisitions. Hopefully it paints a clearer picture of what will happen with the company in the future. We're not really predicting launch dates or guaranteeing that everything in this article will launch in 2015; we're outlining a list of projects and initiatives currently underway at Google HQ. Think of it as a big "to-do" list for Google—things can be delayed, moved around, or canceled, but to the best of our knowledge, this is a good synopsis of the company's current goals.

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Nest: Google's Home Automation Division

Nest

Nest

Dropcam

Revolv

The 2013-2014 version of the Ars Google Tracker worked out pretty well: Android Wear, Google Play Games, Android One, the Nexus Player, YouTube Music Key, and many features of Lollipop were all represented. So if you pay close attention to Google news, this post should be a good refresher. And if you're just a casual Google observer, it's time to catch up on all you've been missing.

Home automation was a major expansion point for Google in 2014, and the market feels like the company's next big ecosystem. At the very beginning of 2014, Google bought Nest Labs, the makers of the Nest Thermostat, for $3.2 billion. Shortly after the acquisition, news came out that Tony Fadell—Nest's founder and "one of the fathers of the iPod"—was a direct report to Google CEO Larry Page. Only a handful of Google employees deal directly with Page, and they're usually heads of divisions at Google. So at the time, we posited that Fadell would be running Google's "smart home" division.

In the past year, it looks like that's been happening. With its new stack of Google Bucks, Nest has been on a home automation acquisition spree, snapping up Dropcam for $555 million and Revolv for an undisclosed sum. Dropcam makes Wi-Fi webcams, and it's been allowed to operate after the acquisition with seemingly little changes to the business. Nest's product portfolio now includes the Nest Thermostat, Nest Protect (a smart smoke detector), and Dropcam's webcams.

Revolv is the more interesting acquisition though. The company made and sold a "smart home hub," and unlike Dropcam, operations were immediately closed down once Nest/Google bought it. Nest and Dropcam have both succeeded in the smart home space specifically because they are standalone products, but Revolv is a whole other beast. It was an ecosystem product.

To understand what Revolv was, we have to understand what a smart home hub is. Right now, in your house or office, you have a bunch of products that rely on wireless connectivity. They all have Wi-Fi chips, and you have a Wi-Fi router, which connects everything to everything else and gets all of it onto the Internet. A smart home hub works pretty much the same way. You can currently buy all sorts of connected "smart home" products: light switches, light bulbs, power outlets, door locks, garage door openers, and sensors, all of which can be triggered or read remotely. Just like a Wi-Fi router, a smart home hub is necessary to connect all your smart home stuff to all your other smart home stuff and make everything accessible via the Internet. In fact, we reviewed the Revolv hub and a competitor, the SmartThings Hub, earlier this year.

Why not just use the existing Wi-Fi router the way a Nest does? Well, a lot of this stuff is going to run on battery power, and Wi-Fi is very battery hungry. No one wants to recharge their door locks every night, so less power-hungry wireless protocols were created to allow for battery life measured in years rather than hours.

The most oft-cited problem with smart homes is that no one has really picked a communication standard yet, so there are competing, incompatible wireless protocols out there—the "Blu-ray versus HD-DVD" or "VHS versus Betamax" problem of smart homes. Smart hubs like Revolv fixed this by including multiple antennas. Just like how your router probably has Wi-Fi antennas and Ethernet plugs, a good smart home hub can bridge multiple, incompatible standards together. Revolv was the most comprehensive hub out there—it had seven different wireless antennas.

The other job of a smart home hub is to provide a user interface, usually in the form of an app. The software interface is where there is the most room for improvement in home automation. There are two schools of thought: complete automation, which makes your lights turn on and your doors unlock when you want them to, which is hard and imperfect, and manually turning things on, which involves the multi-step process of unlocking your phone and opening an app just to work a light switch.

Google is, of course, one of the biggest software companies in the world, so our guess with the Revolv purchase is that Google feels it can bring a unique take on smart home software. The company has tried in the past. Before the Nest acquisition, EnergySense was Google's leaked-but-never-released attempt at making smart thermostat hardware, and two years ago we found code for a Google Now card to turn a connected light bulb "on" and "off."

The Revolv acquisition feels really important. Unlike Dropcam and Nest products, it's useless as a standalone item. Revolv was a unifying hub for an entire hardware ecosystem, which Nest and Google chose to tackle when they bought the company.

These days Nest has done a bit of ecosystem work too. "Works with Nest" is an API program that allows communication between Nest and other smart home devices. Some examples given were for things like an activity tracker that would trigger Nest Thermostat to heat the house up when it senses you are about to wake up in the morning, or LED lights that were hooked up to the Nest Protect in order to flash red when smoke was detected.

Recently, we saw the first integration of Google and Nest. Today you can say something like "OK Google. Set the temperature to 75 degrees" into the Google app, and it will adjust the Nest. The Google app can also tell the thermostat when you're home or away, and it will preheat the house when it senses you are headed home.

The competition seems to be gearing up for a big smart home push as well. There was SmartThings, a Kickstarter-project-turned-company that also made a smart home hub. Samsung bought SmartThings in August, and, unlike Revolv, its device remains on sale. Apple is joining the party with the HomeKit API, which, rather than a hub, relies on pairing smart home items with an iPhone.