Nest reveals tie-ups with Jawbone, Mercedes and others

Google's Nest division is to allow its "smart" thermostats and smoke alarms to communicate with third party products.

Initial tie-ups include letting Mercedes cars and Jawbone Up wristbands turn the heating on, and allowing Lifx's wi-fi connected light bulbs to flash red if smoke is detected.

Nest's co-founder Matt Rogers told the BBC that users would have control over which link-ups were allowed.

But one expert warned that hackers might try to exploit the facility.

"You don't want to get woken up at 04:00 by a smoke alarm because of malicious activity," said Dr Ian Brown, from the Oxford Internet Institute.

"Google in general are very good as internet security goes, but it will be very interesting to see how long it might be before the first vulnerabilities are found in these systems."

Although Nest is opening up its application program interfaces (APIs) - the code that controls how the different software programs interact - to "anybody" via its website, Mr Rogers said steps had been taken to restrict rogue developers.

"We still have the ability to deactivate their accounts and basically delete all their integrations," he said.

"We have also put a limit in the developer programme of how far they can get without actually having to go through some approval processes.

"They can go up to 1,000 users without having to talk to us... but over that they have to get formal approval and go through a testing process.