October 6 AMA session with PlanetWatch CEO

In this article you will find the answers that our CEO, Claudio Parrinello, gave in the AMA session on the 6th of October.

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

On the 22nd of September the World Health Organization issued new guidelines on air quality, significantly reducing the limits for long-term exposure to the most harmful pollutants, in particular fine particulate matter PM2.5, and nitrogen dioxide (which are both measured by our Type 1 device). NO2 is produced in many ways, in particular by combustion engines, e.g cars. They highlighted that prolonged exposure even to low levels of these pollutants constitutes a danger to human health and that, in fact, there is no threshold below which the risk does not increase.

So, what we aim to do at PlanetWatch, which is monitoring these and other pollutants everywhere, is very important, and we want to do it right.  

In the previous AMA, I’ve talked about a new set of FAQs, updated and enlarged and this is being worked upon.

Question forms for Technology and Science AMAs went online and we already got lots of questions. We will be starting to answer these questions as of next week.

Regarding Type 2 sensors, there will definitely be new devices before the end of the year. Your license purchase will put you on the waiting list for sensors which will be sold by us. Could such sensors be sold by others? It’s not foreseen for now, but yes, sooner or later that could happen. Please, remember to check who you are buying from.

Kaiterra sales started yesterday. Onboarding will happen as soon as all sensors from the September batch have been processed. As mentioned on Twitter, we cannot process all sales in one go, so we are sending emails following license purchase orders with a view to make sure that the time between your payment and sensor delivery is not too long. 

As you know, there are three items which are in progress, which are the onboarding of Kaiterra and AWAIR sensors as well as the final delivery of the new App. We are a bit late on all of these items, one reason being that they are connected, since the new App will make the activation of these sensors easier. Therefore, we believe it makes sense to set a single goal for the release of all these three things, that is by the end of October at the latest.

Here you can find PlanetWatchers’ questions to Claudio

Do you cover the cost of PlanetWatchers who had a delay to get their September Airqinos batch?

There is no cost to cover here, because PlanetWatch is NOT an investment scheme! PlanetWatch is an environmental monitoring project with rewards to those who help us generate data. 

Now, let’s talk about costs: our core service to the community is to grow and operate the PlanetWatch network, via all our blockchain and data analysis software. You contribute to the cost of these services by buying a license, which gives you the right to connect a sensor to our network for a fixed amount of time and earn rewards based on your data streams. As you know, your license time starts when you activate the sensor, so a sensor delivery delay does not affect your license time.

We do our best to minimise delays, but as I said several times, we are not in the business of sensor shipment and logistics, plus the market is tight. Having said that, I do remember a statement I made back in August, which needs to be clarified: “During the PlanetWatch warranty period, if the sensor needs to be serviced, or replaced, you will also get PLANETS to cover the missed streams.”

First of all, this is about problems occurring AFTER a successful start of service, so that your license clock has started ticking. As I said, before the license starts, there is nothing to compensate. In the worst-case scenario we can issue a refund for the sensor and the license.

When such problems occur, first of all we do our best to solve them. If this takes time, what we can do is to compensate for the lost time of your license. We will grant you extra license time so you can earn extra PLANETS. Therefore, your compensation is granted via extra time of participation in PlanetWatch, which means time to earn extra tokens. This only applies in the event that some license time was “wasted” because of tech problems during warranty time, following some period of successful operation (at least 20 days). 

For example, if your sensor suddenly stops working after a successful period of at least 20 days of operations, and it takes us 10 days to restore service or to send you a new sensor, you will get 10 extra license days.  

Please, be reasonable and do not flood us now with tickets to request extra licence time for every single hiccup, because this would harm the project. If we have to spend our time answering unreasonable tickets, we cannot progress in other areas and eventually we all lose out.

Bear in mind that we invest considerable time in asking manufacturers to improve their products. For example, in future Airqino batches there will be an additional led displaying SIM status.

This is the best we can do. I believe we are the only project amongst those comparable to us that puts so much effort in protecting participants.

Is it possible to expect future integrations with other Atmotube products like Atmotube Plus? 

Probably not. We keep reviewing devices and we assess their performance with respect to our goals. I do not expect another Atmotube device to be onboarded soon. 

Was anything related to PlanetWatch or Air Quality in general discussed during the latest CERN Alumni you took place? Anything else worth mentioning to your community?

I have been discussing a stronger collaboration with CERN. As you know, we are a CERN spin-off, they already support us, mention us, write about us, but we want to step this up and engage in some specific project deliverable. Anyway it is too early to say what is next.

When I purchased my Type 1 License there were 374 purchased. Right now 521 Type 1 Sensors are active. What happened to the waiting list? Why am I getting passed by other people?

Again, the waiting list and the number of sold licenses that you see on our Ecommerce interface refers to individual PlanetWatchers buying licenses online from us. There are other sales channels: people could in principle get the sensor elsewhere, plus we also sell to corporates when this is aligned with our goals. Finally, we may want to retain ownership of some sensors and deploy them ourselves. On the other hand, remember that ALL sensors are counted in the Explorer and on the map, so there is nothing strange if you see that the number of active sensors exceeds the number of licenses sold on the website.

We are doing our best to ensure that a significant sensor stock is reserved for you guys. We do this by buying in bulk third-party devices, which is time-consuming and risky for us.

Hello Claudio, do you know about future batches and quantities of Type 1 and Type 3 sensors?

It changes all the time, it is difficult to make forecasts. I think the best and fairest thing to do here is to give you info over time on how many devices are sold via us so you can see how batches progress. Once again – we are looking to scale up volumes. Currently the hardware market is very tight. There is no monopoly, you buy where you want, but we can give you visibility of our sensor sales performance.

I want to contribute (for free) to PlanetWatch allowing you to connect my second/third/fourth Type 4 sensors. The reason for this, I already have a couple of sensors in my home, but since I can not get rewards for all, I want to give you, for free, air quality of my other rooms (if you want).

That is very generous, but it could complicate data management and analysis, so we will not implement it for now, thank you.

Analysing BIG data requires tremendous computing power. Do you have the required technology to do this, and who is helping you here?

We have a data scientist in the PlanetWatch Team and we are looking to both scale up the internal team and to leverage external collaborations, both with industries and academia. 

Is it possible to build in the functionality so that sensor rewards are split between 2 accounts?

Yes, we are working to make this service available to you. 

Amazing job, Claudio & Team! Wanted to ask, is there a sub-budget for Tier 1 and Tier 2 as it is between the different Types? Thank you!

Yes, there are separate budgets for sensor Types and by Tier.

Have you thought about building PlanetWatch’s own blockchain?

We are thinking and working on many technical developments.

Are you currently analysing the AQI data you are getting from the sensors? Anything more you can tell about the data you are getting?

Yes. For example, for indoors there is this hotel which is a client of PlanetWatch in Italy, where we deployed monitoring solutions and we achieved RESET certification for them: we also wrote a scientific paper about it in collaboration with the University of Bologna. As for outdoors, we have made an interesting analysis for a medium-sized city in the South of Italy named Taranto, which has major air pollution challenges: we deployed a test network, we analysed air quality data over some amount of time and we came to some conclusions. That report is to be translated in English and we will share this soon, because it is a good example of the first data products that we are building. 

Hi, according to the PW website they said Atmotube Type 4 device is sold worldwide. I’m living in Singapore. Can I buy this Type 4, since I can see that if I want to buy a license it is only for a few countries.

Licenses are available worldwide. Please note that for non-European countries you have to use planetwatch.us.

What is the connection between RESET and Planetwatch for air quality? What role does Planetwatch play to get the certification?

In order to achieve RESET certification, the process must be designed and supervised by a RESET-certified engineer, use RESET-certified devices, and share data with RESET in a RESET-stipulated way.

There are not many certified RESET professionals in Europe yet, and one of them works for PlanetWatch. Her name is Gabriella Motta. She’s an engineer and an air quality expert and she will run our science AMA starting next week. There aren’t many companies who can provide turnkey RESET certification solutions and PlanetWatch is one of them.

If Bitmart does not list $Planets by the time Sensedge Mini is available in the US, can we purchase it by combining fiat (?) and earned Planets with Atmotube Pro? The checkout page is one or the other, not both.

I see the point but it is too complicated, sorry.

How will the governance board be made up? In order to vote on new projects and new rewards for the years to come.

It is spelled out in a section of the White Paper and it is based on sensor owner reputation.

There are two Type 4 devices. Will there ever be something like two different Type 1 devices?

Yes, our scope goes even beyond air quality, so we see room for a number of innovative sensors, which we will classify basically according to the existing Types.

I work in public health research and love the mission of this project. In speaking with an environmental health colleague, we were debating the value of a massive air quality dataset relative to the status quo of disjointed smaller datasets. We agreed a massive air quality dataset may reveal weak to moderate correlations we did not know previously existed, but that the ability to conduct targeted analyses is where most environmental health researchers will want to focus. For such a study, it would be nice to have some demographic data about the people who live in the homes as well to know who is most at risk. Will researchers be able to purchase these sorts of targeted data from PW and also know some demographic data as well?

We know that this would add a lot of value to the data so we look forward to collecting relevant user profile info for the purpose of user base segmentation. So we will be asking people over time to disclose, if they are OK with that, more information about where they place their sensors and their habits, e.g. if they are smokers or not. Of course, everything will be leveraged in an anonymous way as always. I really like the fact that a professional working in Public Health research is asking detailed questions about our data sets, and we are looking forward to working with these people and to value the data through external feedback and advice.

Keep watching our Planet and stay tuned for more announcements coming soon!