Hours Before Apple Talks About Its Plans To Take Over Your Home, Google Announces New Features For Nest

Nest - the smart thermostat company that Google bought for $3.2 billion in January - just announced that it will now connect to and work with a handful of new "smart home" systems.

By integrating with these whole-home automation systems (Control4, Creston, Remote Technologies Incorporated, and Universal Remote Control), the company wants to give owners of its smart thermostat and smoke detector products more ways to integrate them to other connected products they have.

Earlier this summer, Nest bought the internet camera company Dropcam for $555 million, and since the acquisition, the two lines of products have a developed a number of new ways to work together.

If you have Nest's smoke detector product, for example, Dropcam will record a video clip for you when it goes off. Or, if you have the Nest thermostat and you set its status to "away" when you leave the house, Dropcam will automatically turn on motion alerts, so you'll know if anyone's in the house.

The timing of this announcement is interesting. Apple is about to have a mega-event for the iPhone 6. It will also likely expand on its "HomeKit" which is Apple's plans for home automation. Perhaps Google wanted to get ahead of Apple's announcement and remind the media that it owns Nest.