Welcome to the first mainstream connected home appliance everyone should want to own

Much in the same way that smartphones have come to enhance the way we communicate, the world of connected home tech is all about enhancing the way your living space communicates. There are a couple of really great examples of this technology (and heaps of truly terrible examples to match) but one of the best right now is the Nest Thermostat. Nest Labs was created to build products that change how we use regular household tech, with an immediate focus on efficiency, safety, and ease of use. The biggest reason to consider one for yourself, aside from how nice it looks on the wall, is all of the tech baked into this tiny casing that dramatically changes how you use your thermostat.

Just as our fearless leader promised in his weekly missive, we're going to start taking a more focused approach for certain topics, and I have the honor of being the first to bring this to you. We're going to start off with the now Google-owned Nest Labs and their Nest Thermostat. Rather than post a single long post on the Nest Thermostat like we would a smartphone or tablet review, we're going to break down the basics of why you would want one, installation, ownership, and getting the most out of the $250 tiny wall computer.

Each day this week we will have something new in the series to share with you, and with each post we'll be doing our best to answer questions in the comments sections. By the end of the week we'll have covered the basics as well as we know how to cover them, and next week we'll fire up a whole new series. Coming up this afternoon we'll start with the simple question: What is a Nest, and why would you want one?

So get ready for more on the Nest Thermostat, what it means for us as consumer, and what it means for the connected and mobile industries at large. To make sure you don't miss a thing, lock in on our Nest Thermostat page.

The folks at Cree dropped the first bulb in their new Connected line this week at Home Depot, and as we said in our hands on if you're looking for cheap bulbs to add to your connected home these are the way to go. Rather than bind themselves to a single kind of connecte hub, Cree Connected bulbs work with any ZigBee hub. You wouldn't know that by looking at the box, however, since the only instructions included are to connect to the Wink hub. While Wink is a decent way to go if you've already decided to go that route, those of us with the Philips Hue hub running multiple rooms of bulbs are probably going to want to keep using the Hue apps to control those bulbs. The Cree Connected bulbs won't automatically connect to the Hue hub out of the box, but through the manual add feature in the Hue app you can add the Cree bulbs with no problem.