IKair chinese pollution-monitoring startup

[AQcalc Team at Acculation]

Hi,

Has anyone heard of the Chinese start-up Ikair?

This company's intended products have a number of similarities with Air Quality Eggs, starting perhaps with their name's similarity to AQE's slogan ("IKAir" which is intended to be pronounced, apparently, as the English "I Care Air"), and their slogan, which Google translated into English as "Love Your Air".

I am not a native Chinese speaker, and a lot of the information on the company's website is in Chinese in images that Google cannot translate. I did find some Chinese press articles that Google was able to translate, however:

Chinese version: http://tech.ifeng.com/it/detail_2013_11/05/30961025_0.shtml

Here is the Google translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://tech.ifeng.com/it/detail_2013_11/05/30961025_0.shtml&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dikair%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den

They appear to have designed their product as modular, stackable white plastic cylinders. Each cylinder might include a sensor for PM2.5 dust, radon, noise, light, temperature, humidity, CO2, NO2, CO etc. It will report these data to the company's cloud (presumably closed and proprietary).

The stackable cylinders are networked, and the company website shows a fancy-looking Chinese-language iPhone app that can receive push notifications from the stacked cylinders via a cloud backend.

According to the November 2013 article, this product is not yet shipping. Ikair has raised $2 million (not sure whether HK$ or USD$) and plans to being mass production this month, December 2013.

Since Google wasn't able to find any English articles on ikair at all (in fact, this may be one of the first public English-language mentions), I'm assuming their initial launch will be China only.

Does anyone know any more about this company? Any Chinese-language speakers? How similar are these products to Air Quality Eggs? Are the products shipping? Any plans to ship to the US? Will the products work in the US, or is their cloud restricted to China?

[Tianqi Zhang]

Hi I'm new to this group and I'm from China. I looked into this iKair product, and found out they have just finished their fund raising on a Chinese kickstarter-like website called demohour. The basic model is now available for pre-order at about $40, which includes temperature, humidity, light, noise and basic air pollution sensor.

Their PM2.5 module is still in development, although they did claim that their particle sensor has one output for >1μm and another for >2.5μm, so I'm guessing maybe a Sharp GP2Y1010AU0F or a DSM501, very common choice. They also have a formaldehyde module in development too.

No shipment schedule details on the pre-order page can be found. From my experience there's not likely a region "restriction" of their push notification service, however shipment could be another story.

[Tianqi Zhang]

Oh I forgot the demohour link:
http://www.demohour.com/products/131019