Innovation: Who Made That Smoke Alarm?

Jens Mortensen for The New York TimesIn the early 1960s, Duane Pearsall tinkered in his engineering lab with a machine he called a “static neutralizer” — an ion generator designed to control static electricity in factories and photo labs. But when one of his technicians lit up a cigarette, a meter measuring the ions went haywire. Pearsall realized he’d just hit on a low-cost, low-power method for sniffing smoke. During the next decade, he and his team developed the SmokeGard, which hung from the ceiling and made a noxious noise whenever it sensed a fire. Soon, smoke detectors were in most homes in America and had saved hundreds of lives. Yet they could also be irritating. “You have no way of knowing whether it’s operational unless you set fire to your house,” wrote one newspaper humorist in 1977 of a cheap smoke detector he bought in a local store. “Merely holding the smoke detector in your lap while you watch Farrah Fawcett-Majors is not a true test.”

You can now push a button on smoke alarms to test whether they’re working, but the button is usually out of reach. The plastic puck, so perversely hard to control, has inspired several anti-fan pages on Facebook. Hundreds of people shared their rage at the way when the battery runs low it would chirp merrily as you lay in bed wishing it would die. “You’d hear it in the middle of the night: beep, beep,” says Tony Fadell, an industrial designer known for his work at Apple on the iPod. “Then the family comedy would ensue.” In 2010, Fadell co-founded a company called Nest to take aim at what he calls the “unloved object” in our homes. The smoke detector struck him as an obvious target for redesign. Fadell and his team noted that people particularly resented the way smoke detectors bully us in the kitchen — it feels as if we’re being shrieked at by an unreasonable husband or wife. “You’re like, ‘I’m just burning the toast!’ ” Fadell says. A new device had to be able to distinguish a wisp of smoke from a dangerous fire. In a nonemergency, it needed to tell you, “ ‘Hey honey, I smell something,’ ” he says. And so his Nest Protect alarm reacts to cooking smoke with a suitably low-key alert, saying, “Heads up!” in a woman’s voice. To turn off the alarm, you wave your hand underneath it or control it with your phone. That, says Fadell, is like telling the machine, “Honey, I got this.” The Nest Protect has many moods, which it conveys with a blush of colored light: “When it glows green, it’s saying, ‘Everything’s working just fine.’ If it glows yellow, you just wave at it, and it will say, ‘Batteries are low,’ ” according to Fadell.

But this cheerful smoke detector costs almost 10 times as much as the cranky plastic disc you can pick up from the hardware store. And — heads up! — if you neglect its batteries, the Nest Protect will eventually start chirping in the night, just like all the others.

AIR-QUALITY CONTROL

Mark Belinsky invented a “smart air monitor” called the Birdi that sniffs for smoke and also reports on pollutants and allergens in the home; it has just become available for preorder.

How did you hit on this idea? In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, my grandmother was heating her home with her gas stove, releasing dangerous amounts of carbon monoxide into the air. I wanted a device that would call her to explain the danger and would also warn me. Nothing like that exists, and so in May my friend and I built the prototype at the Big Apps hackathon in New York. We lit a fire underneath a circuit board, and then everyone in the audience who had signed up for our app got a phone call telling them there was an emergency. People were excited because they saw this idea could work. From there, the orders started rolling in.

You’ve designed the Birdi so it will monitor the air pollution in the room, as well as sniffing for smoke and carbon monoxide. Why? We thought it could do more. Of course it’s there to detect smoke, but why not have it also sense everyday problems and make my life better? It should be able to detect particulate matter and tell you not only what’s in your house, but also what’s in the neighborhood and your city.

And how’s your grandmother doing? Things turned out O.K. for her. Once the lights came on, so did her heat.

Ad Blocking Raises Alarm Among Firms Like Google

PARIS — Xavier Niel, the French technology entrepreneur, has made a career of disrupting the status quo.

Now, he has dared to take on Google and other online advertisers in a battle that puts the Web companies under pressure to use the wealth generated by the ads to help pay for the network pipelines that deliver the content.

Mr. Niel’s telecommunications company, Free, which has an estimated 5.2 million Internet-access users in France, began last week to enable its customers to block Web advertising. The company is updating users’ software with an ad-blocking feature as the default setting.

That move has raised alarm among companies that, like Google, have based their entire business models on providing free content to consumers by festooning Web pages with paid advertisements. Although Google so far has kept largely silent about Free’s challenge, the reaction from the small Web operators who live and die by online ads has been vociferous.

No Internet access provider “has the right to decide in place of its citizens what they access or not on the Internet,” Spiil, an association of French online news publishers, said in a statement Friday.

The French government has stepped into the fray. On Monday Fleur Pellerin, the French minister for the digital economy, plans to convene a meeting of the feuding parties to seek a resolution.

Free’s shock to advertisers was widely seen as an attack on Google, and is part of the larger, global battle over the question of who should pay to deliver information on the Web — content providers or Internet service providers. An attempt to rewrite the rules failed at the December talks of the International Telecommunication Union in Dubai, after the United States and other nations objected to a proposal that, among other measures, would have required content providers to pay.

Mr. Niel declined to comment on Sunday, through a spokeswoman, Isabelle Audap.

But he has often complained that Google’s content, which includes the ever expanding YouTube video library, occupies too much of his network’s bandwidth, or carrying capacity. “The pipelines between Google and us are full at certain hours, and no one wants to take responsibility for adding capacity,” he said during an interview last year with the newsmagazine Nouvel Observateur. “It’s a classic problem that happens everywhere, but especially with Google.”

Analysts said that French regulators would probably not oppose an agreement between Free and Google aimed at smoothing traffic flows and improving the quality of the service, as long as competitors were not disadvantaged. But they said regulators would probably not allow an Internet access provider to unilaterally block content.

When it comes to blocking ads, though, disgruntled consumers do not have to rely on their Internet service providers. Consumers already have the option of downloading software like Adblock Plus to do the job for them.

Free is the second-largest Internet access provider in France, behind Orange, which is operated by France Telecom and has 9.8 million Internet customers. Because Free seeks to be a low-cost competitor, the company may feel itself particularly vulnerable to the expense of providing capacity to meet Internet users’ ever-growing demand for streaming and downloading videos, music and the like.

Ms. Pellerin, the digital economy minister, expressed sympathy for Free’s position in an interview with Le Figaro, published Saturday. “There are today real questions about the sharing of value between the content providers — notably in video, which uses a lot of bandwidth — and the operators,” she said.

“In France, and in Europe,” Ms. Pellerin added, “we have to find more consensual ways of integrating the giants of the Internet into national ecosystems.” And in a subsequent Twitter message, she said she was “no fan of intrusive advertising, but favorable to a solution of no opt-out by default.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 7, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated Iliad’s third-quarter revenue. It was €819 million, not €819 billion.