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November 24th AMA session with PlanetWatch CEO

November 24th AMA session with PlanetWatch CEO

In this article you will find the answers that our CEO, Claudio Parrinello, gave in the AMA session on November 24th.

Before answering your questions, let me first start with some announcements.

Once again, the Barcelona event last week was very intense and useful. Great occasion to meet several PlanetWatchers but also to review some promising technologies which could add value to PlanetWatch.

As you read on Twitter, we made our big announcement #1 for November. A PLANETS.Fund has been set up by our friends at Borderless Capital to provide significant resources to the development of PlanetWatch. This was indeed a big announcement not only because the amounts are significant, but also because it’s SMART money coming to us. SMART means that if you carefully read the investor list, and google the entities and people that you are not familiar with, you will see that they are all industry leaders. They know what we need to scale and they will deliver value to us that goes beyond the monetary one. For example, I believe that some of them will help us get listed on Tier 1 exchanges as soon as possible. 

What’s next? I am leaving for Miami and I will be in a panel discussion on “Empowering ESG and sustainability with blockchain”. You should watch the whole Decipher event if you’d like to hear other major PlanetWatch announcements which are very likely to come during this event.

Now, achieving milestones is great, but we don’t sit on them! We dance for 5 minutes, then we go back to work! Every milestone brings additional responsibilities and raises expectations. 

We are well aware of the fact that we must manage to reduce sensor waiting times for PlanetWatchers, streamline the KYC process and complete the App debugging. Rest assured that we are 100% focused on such current issues whilst building a great future. 

Talking about current issues, please, bear in mind that when we say that someone is eligible to get a sensor during a specific batch, our batches are organised according to quarters, not according to months. So, Q4 2021 is one batch, Q1 2022 is another batch, and we are unable to tell you whether it’s going to be January or February for example. Sensor availability can change in real time, but we will always follow the waiting list according to the license purchase order.

There is some good news for people who bought Airqino: I believe that some emails with the purchase link are being sent out as we speak, as the stock situation is slowly improving. We are putting a lot of work into this and I’m quite optimistic for next year.

Very soon we will start publishing updated FAQs, since we believe this will reduce the number of tickets and issues that Planetwatchers raise. We do need to improve PlanetWatch Service Support, because you deserve it and it is necessary.

Here you can find PlanetWatchers’ questions to Claudio

Hi Claudio, first of all I wasn’t to say a huge “Thank you!” to all the PlanetWatch team. Do you have an idea of the future Type 2 price?

Thank you very much. I do not know it yet. We will try to make it as reasonable as possible.

How/Where can we send more information on the location and height of our Airqino sensor? As this might be valuable information for PlanetWatch?

Absolutely, this is valuable information. At some point we will publish guidelines on the most suitable installation procedure and we will be seeking additional information from you, because the more we know about the installation, the better use we can make of the data.

Hi, Claudio! You mentioned in previous AMAs that you might reveal some Type 2 device prototype sketches, is it still on agenda sometime in the near future?
Please do wait a bit more, since the design is being finalised and discussed, so it is a bit too early to show pictures.

I paid for a Type 4 License, but Awair is not available in my country (North Macedonia) and there is no other sensor available for purchase. Should I cancel my License or wait for Type 4 compatible sensors to become available? Thank you.

The honest answer is that it is up to you. Since I cannot promise if and when a suitable device will become available in your country, you may want to get a refund. If you are not too worried or if you have no problem with waiting, of course you can wait. The license will not kick in until you connect it with a sensor so it is up to you really.

Any news about Type 4 sensors, will there be new devices joining this group in 2021?
I do not expect new Type 4 devices to be available before the end of the year. However, we have big plans for onboarding devices next year.

What is the goal of the number of Type 4 sensors deployed to make data big and relevant enough?
For outdoors, it is about covering densely populated areas, based on the pixel structure. For indoor sensors, it is about segmentation. Type 4 sensors are more suitable for households: we believe it would be interesting to get a sample of typical air quality in households across several countries. Having at least 100+ in each country could allow meaningful comparisons.

You often use the word, “Trust Us” which as a Planetwatcher I do, but can more information be made available to give Planetwatchers a deeper understanding on what is long term sustainability of the project?
Yesterday a major announcement was released. I wonder if the importance of such an announcement was fully perceived: key leaders from the blockchain world, including Algorand’s CEO, invested in PlanetWatch, which is a huge expression of trust coming from experts. Obviously, our strategy and road map make sense to them and they believe we are sustainable. 

Just wanted to thank the whole team about the project. Since I have been involved in the project I am paying a lot more attention to the air quality I and my family are breathing. Thanks and keep up the good work 👏

This is really very, very satisfying to me. Raising awareness of the importance of air quality to better protect everyone’s health is one of the key goals of this project.   

Why is nothing happening with blocked KYC? PlanetWatch support is redirecting us to Synaps and they are not responding to our emails. 

As far as I know they are responding. We are working to speed up the reset process as a whole.

When adding the Atmotube to PW the system automatically added the Planet token as an asset into the Algorand wallet but not when adding Awair & Sense edge. Those of us that did not add Planets as an asset till later manually have a way to redeem those coins that were minted by the sensor as shown in the PW Explorer?

If it is about failing to add an asset, this in principle has not affected the streaming of data. In most cases we do have data and we will at some point send rewards for data flows which happened before the asset initialisation. This is a very different case than when the location is missing, because unfortunately when it is missing, we do not receive the data and we cannot issue the rewards. Because of location-related problems, as you know, we issued a one month free license. We will of course inform you when this is completely sorted out.

The Awairs do not have GPS, so how do you verify the data and location of the device?
To some extent it is trust, because it will not bring benefits putting fake locations in the App. On the other hand of course we are performing some checks to prevent people setting up farms. Such checks are performed by algorithms. You probably know that we are fairly good at detecting cheaters because we detected quite a few in the past and we banned them.

When are we planning to recommend updating the real address of hosted Awair Element sensors as having a company address does not add value to data?

As you know, at some point we recommended and forced fake addresses into the sensor just as a quick fix to a problem. We are working on this, and we will let you know when you are able to insert your real location, that it is of course what is of interest to us. I think as of next week already via the Explorer you will be able to put the correct location but we shall let you know.

Hello Claudio, why are support tickets not being answered for 7 days and longer? Due to staff shortage? How can it be improved?
We are working to improve the support system. We are scaling up the team and resolving bugs. On your side, please help us by opening only necessary tickets. We do get hundreds of tickets with questions whose answer is either in the White Paper or in previous AMAs. And if a problem gets sorted out before we answer a ticket, please let us know so we close the ticket. As I have announced, FAQs will also be updated very soon.

Is there any news regarding the increase in reward for Kaiterra Sensedge Mini?

We are working to set up the infrastructure to call a governance vote that would be managed by the blockchain through the App. The goal is to run this governance vote by mid-December. Of course prior to that there will be a blog post published which explains in detail how you vote and what to be asked to vote upon.

Do you know when the next batch of emails for Q4 2021 Arqino sales will go out?
200 emails for the Q4 2021 batch were already sent and shippings will start later this week. More emails will be sent early in December if all goes well.

Do you know when the Q4 2021 batch of emails for Type 3 Kaiterra sales will go out?
We are waiting for a delivery from Kaiterra. I trust we will have a positive update next week. 

Since the saturation point or total number of Type 4 sensors is reached, for how long will we continue to get full rewards?

It depends on how fast we scale. On the Explorer there is a new section which refers to the number of Planets in the so-called “Recycle Bin”. The basic idea is that since the annual and daily rewards budget for every type of sensor is fixed, in the early stages of the network we did not use all the Planets in the rewards budget. The unused Planets, for each sensor Type and pixel Tier, are set aside in accounts called Recycled Bins. The Planets sitting in a Recycle Bin start to get spent once we reach the saturation point for that Type/Tier. They help top up rewards up to the daily maximum and this continues for as long as there are tokens available in the Recycle Bin. In practice, tokens in a Recycle Bin could last for a few weeks or, months, depending on our growth rate. The figures are on the Explorer, so you can do your own models and extrapolations.

Incidentally, I am the one who chose the word “saturation” and now I realise that it was a poor choice of wording, because it sounds like something negative while in reality it is a milestone. I am happy that we reached saturation for Type 4, because it means that we are getting big!

Keep watching the Planet and get ready to help us make it greener by staking your Planets!

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