birdi

The better your air quality, the better your well-being. Right now, most of us don't know what we're breathing in when we're at home, or what it’s doing to our health. That's why we take air quality so seriously. At Birdi, part of our mission is to help you breathe a bit easier.

Have you ever been in a room that started out comfortable, but quickly turned stuffy? This happens, in part, because the longer we stay in a room, the more oxygen it loses and the more carbon dioxide [CO₂] builds up, causing what’s known as stale air. One feature we've been putting a lot of work into is stale air. As the CO₂ builds up and stale air lingers, you can start feeling groggy and even a little disoriented. Note: Don’t confuse CO₂ with poisonous carbon monoxide [CO] gas, which is deadly and also detectable by the Birdi Smart Detector.

For example, here at Birdi headquarters, stale air CO₂ build up is especially apparent in our conference rooms. Taking a glance into the Birdi iPhone app, shows exactly what happens during our weekly engineering meetings if we don’t circulate the air in the room.

The rise in stale air CO₂ is steady throughout the room, peaking at about 2200 PPM, which is not hazardous but still problematic. This can mean growing drowsy, getting headaches, or having trouble functioning - definitely not feelings you want in the office or at home. At this point, most people start reaching for more coffee, when what they actually need is more fresh air. The result is not just a health impact, but also productivity.

For indoor air quality, stale air CO₂ can also act as a surrogate for indoor pollutants and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These organic chemicals are widely used as ingredients in household products like paints, cleaning products, cosmetics, carpets and furniture. As air gets stuffier, there’s less circulation and the chemical exposure increases the chance that the health is impacted. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, levels of several organics average 2-5x higher indoors than outdoors, and can be up to 1000x higher after activities like painting. Without fixing the levels of stale air CO₂, this can have serious health consequences.

The air situation can get so bad that there's a name: sick building syndrome. The National Institute of Health lists symptoms of sick building syndrome as Headache, dizziness, nausea, eye, nose or throat irritation, dry cough, dry or itching skin, difficulty in concentration, fatigue, sensitivity to odors, hoarseness of voice, allergies, cold, flu-like symptoms, increased incidence of asthma attacks and personality changes.  

So if it's a problem, why isn't stale air CO₂ tracking more widespread?

One reason: cost. At Birdi, we’ve built our own sensor to make it affordable for the very first time. We want to make it easy for everyone to bring this experience and safety precaution into their homes. Another reason Stale air CO₂ isn’t talked about more is due to the lack of quality monitors. A number of devices claim to be air quality monitors, but aren't properly calibrated, so the data is meaningless. Because Birdi is a certified life safety device, we calibrate and test our systems and sensors before they leave the factory, creating a baseline of information that we operate from. Not only does Birdi provide more meaning to curious homeowners, we can also start looking at data from a bird's eye view, gaining insight into neighborhoods and more.

In the Birdi iPhone app, we go further than just diagnosing an issue. We provide actionable tips on how to improve air quality, and explain the changes needed to improve home health. After all, knowing is only half the battle.

As a startup working on life-saving tech, it's especially critical to us that the full Birdi experience is as flawless as possible. Over the last few months, we've begun shipping the Smart Detectors that we recently manufactured. Some lessons emerged from this batch that we‘d like to share. 

Quality Assurance goes beyond manufacturing: In our last post, I explained how proud we were that manufacturing had gone so well. During our testing, we were excited to see that Birdi performing well in the field. However, since we had to change the packaging at the last minute, we found some people had difficulty setting up their devices. In fact, some people abandoned setup entirely. We've since been adjusting that experience and testing the new unboxing and setup process to ensure success every time.

Lean operations are necessary but difficult: Before we start scaling to bigger numbers, we've had to prioritize executing on engineering. As we continue to revolutionize what's possible in fire and CO safety as well as air quality, we're constantly being invited to present at events, speak to sales agents around the world and respond to customer inquiries. While we recognize how important these things can be, we've made promises to deliver a great product to our current customers that we intend to keep. To do so, our current laser-focus is only on making and shipping a truly unique and remarkable product.

There's tension between privacy and security: Yet both privacy and security are critical. During a few of the setups, some people understandably didn't want to supply real phone numbers and/or home addresses. In one case, this resulted in the fire department being routed to the wrong location during an emergency. Obviously, we need to protect our customers’ privacy wishes, while at the same time making sure to not waste the time of heroes that should be fighting real fires. We've since adjusted the setup experience to:

Be more explicit about why we need private information

Clearly state that private information is confidential, secure and will never be shared

Make it easier for users to opt-out of the enhanced monitoring that needs this info

Verify customer phone numbers are theirs

Confirm customer addresses are real locations

To make sure everything is working how we need it to, we decided to hold back some of the units from this manufacturing run in order to make these fixes. Once everything has gone through full quality assurance and is as smooth and easy as it should be, we’ll resume shipping again. We’re truly sorry for the additional delays, but hope that you understand that our first priority is to deliver a product that you’ll love.

At Birdi, we’re always listening and learning as a company while our Smart Detector evolves. I hope these lessons learned provide insight into where our priorities and focuses are and the level of quality that you can expect coming from products with the Birdi name on them. Thanks, as always, for your continued interest and support.

The first big batch of Birdi Smart Detectors just finished manufacturing at the end of November. Honestly, we couldn’t be happier with how they turned out. They look great, work well, and have that extra bit of magic to make you smile. As you read this, they’re getting prepared to be sent out to even more of our customers. 

When manufacturing consumer electronics, there’s a lot that can go wrong. To make sure that doesn’t happen, we’ve gone through the rigorous steps of making sure that we have the right testing mechanisms on the assembly line, quality assurance protocols and reliability of systems. We’ve even engineered fallbacks to ensure that our customers get an amazing and reliable experience every single time. Thankfully we’re ready now, and just in time for the holidays.

However, due to the holidays being crunch time in the factories. our packaging has gotten a bit backed up. In order to limit further delays, we decided to ship some of the devices in brown kraft cardboard, rather than the fully-designed version. While not as elegant, we wanted to make sure that as many people received Smart Detectors for the holidays as possible.

If you’ve already ordered a Birdi Smart Detector, you should have received an email from us confirming your shipping information is still accurate. As much as we all like receiving surprise gifts, please go back to your inbox to make sure you confirm your mailing address so that we don’t mail one to the wrong home. Once you’ve confirmed your details, you’ll be added to the list and we’ll be sending your devices shortly after. 

Happy holidays from all of us here at Birdi.

Here at Birdi, it’s important to us that any claims that we make about our products are vetted by the world’s leading experts to ensure nothing but the best in terms of accuracy and reliability. To do this for fire and carbon monoxide safety, we turned to Intertek, the largest tester of consumer goods in the world. Today we’re proud to announce that the Birdi Smart detector is now life safety certified for fire and carbon monoxide protection.

Thomas Edison helped to found Intertek, understanding that in order to bring his innovations into the world, they would have to be vetted and considered to be safe. And so, since the invention of the lightbulb, products have been certified to ensure that consumer goods would improve lives while keeping people safe.

Passing the necessary flammability and poison gas tests was in no way easy. We have to ensure that in case of a fire our devices will work exactly as planned. And in a carbon monoxide emergency, we’ll continue to alert you about the danger over the lifespan of the device, which is authorized to the legal maximum of 10 years. We’ve had to set our devices on fire, adjust air flows, simulate the conditions of overseas freight and more. Our engineers have gone above and beyond to test all the various likely and unlikely conditions that could occur so that we can confidently say this device can reliably save the lives of you and your loved ones.

To get it right has unfortunately taken longer than initially expected. We apologize for that and truly thank you for your patience. Now that the Birdi Smart Detector is fully life safety certified, we're ready to ship you your device. Our manufacturing facilities are set up and operational, producing Smart Detectors that we’ll be shipping early November. We’ll be continuing to release devices to beta users until then. Everyone else should expect an email soon to confirm your mailing address.

Thanks again for your support and belief in us. We're so excited for you to experience Birdi first hand. We’ve worked our hardest to build an experience that you'll really love. In fact, you’ll be joining another Birdi advocate in appreciation, Tim Cook, who presented us as an Apple HomeKit partner again at this month’s iPhone launch event:

Sincerely, Mark & The Birdi Team

Firefighters are heroes. They run into burning buildings in our communities to save our lives. They're incredible and they deserve nothing but the best. At Birdi, we're constantly working to improve our product experience with the people who face fire and carbon monoxide emergencies. This means the experience for our customers, but also for those first responders.

When a fire happens, seconds matter. Which is why we're proud to announce our Emergency Concierge Service. In an emergency, we'll call your local fire department for you. By saving precious time we can:

Protect firefighters who can enter homes faster, before the fire gets too extreme

Help homeowners grab the essentials like the kids, pets and photo albums without worrying about dialing 911

Minimize home damage

Prevent the annoyance and expense of false alarms

Protect your valuables even if you’re not near your phone when your Birdi app notifies you about an alarm

To achieve this unique experience, we're tying Birdi Alarms into an award-winning life safety security system. Our unique fire-detecting sensors, combined with our app interactivity means more reliability, less heartache, and faster response times.

According to the National Fire Protection Agency, the number of firefighter injuries during alarms has remained mostly constant for the past 20 years. To us, this reinforces the need for better products that can hopefully help prevent burns, asphyxiation from inhaling smoke, and impact from falling debris.

The Emergency Concierge feature will be shipping along with our first devices this summer and we think you're going to love it. This feature goes even further: we’ll send you replacement batteries if yours run low, call landlines if there’s a problem and more. Stay tuned!

Of course, as long as your phone and Wi-Fi are connected, you can always call 911 and deal with the authorities yourself at no premium. And hopefully extremely quickly!  The Emergency Concierge is a backup plan in case there’s a problem you’re unable to handle yourself. We’re doing our best to ensure you’re always safeguarded no matter what. 

To all of us here at Birdi, safety is paramount. We're always working on ways to do better at saving lives and helping those heroes who risk their own lives to protect us all.

What will the future of your home look like? Apple just gave us a glimpse into things to come at the their developer conference WWDC this week. And I'm excited to announce that Birdi is a key part of that future.

Craig Federighi announced Birdi as part of the HomeKit ecosystem on stage during his keynote presentation:

HomeKit brings some exciting new features to Birdi: 

Cost savings: with environmental sensors in each room, we can automatically adjust your thermostat when you're away to save you money or according to the room you're in to keep you comfortable and your air healthy

Voice control: Siri integration keeps you in control. What's the humidity level in the bedroom? What's the battery level in the kitchen? Now you'll know instantly.

Simple setup: the hardest part of setting up was connecting to the internet. Not anymore. Our secure passwordless connection works in just seconds. It's so easy, it feels like magic.

With Birdi featuring Apple HomeKit technology for home management, a lot of new opportunities present themselves and we’re thrilled to announce these first features. There's a lot more to come, all while keeping your privacy and security paramount. Adhering to the strictest standards in the industry help us to collaborate with partner technologies while never compromising on your safety or overall experience.

Personally, I think you're going to love Birdi with HomeKit technology. And it's been really hard to keep quiet about this until the big unveil! Unfortunately, a feature this big means some extra development time to get it absolutely right. Since we'll be launching our first devices with HomeKit, it means a slight delay, which we truly apologize for. In the meantime, more units have been sent to Beta users and we'll be shipping the first batch by the end of summer.

Millions of data points. That's a lot of data and it’s the amount of information we've received from Smart Detectors in the field so far. Thanks to our trusty Beta users and their devices, we've been learning a LOT. Which has been helping our team catch bugs and make major improvements to the Birdi app and device firmware.

Today, I'm proud to say we're shipping even more devices out to customers thanks to our latest feature: automatic updates. Now your Smart Detector gets smarter over time, upgrading itself with new functions, right over Wi-Fi.

Growing smarter over time means better mold detection, longer battery life and so much more. It also means we can send devices far far away and still be able to catch and fix issues before they become problems. The Birdi team has been hard at work to develop this over the air firmware update feature and we're very proud to launch it.

For those of you who were so excited about Birdi that you signed up for our Beta program, you'll be hearing more from us shortly about getting your units. And don’t worry, the rest of our Smart Detectors are still on track to ship in the first half of this year too. The best part: now they’re smarter than ever!

Birdi works no matter what. It’s that simple. As long as your Smart Detector has power, we’ll keep you safe from smoke and carbon monoxide emergencies.

Our commitment to you is 10 years of service, guaranteed. If it could be longer, it would be, but that’s the longest time allowed by law. 

Every Birdi we ship to you is certified to last by the global authorities in life safety technology. You don’t have to trust us, but you should trust the experts. Our Smart Detectors don’t stop working unless the batteries are removed. If the Wi-Fi goes down or if there’s an issue with the Bluetooth, the life safety aspect of the device continues to operate. Even if something happens to us, your device continues to work as the most reliable and beautiful smoke and carbon monoxide alarm you’ve ever seen. The team at Birdi doesn’t have the ability, and we don’t want the ability, to reach into your home and pull the plug on the device you own.

The phrase "it just works" is too rare for technology. We wanted to change that and make every part of the Birdi experience beautifully simple. Thanks to an innovation we're announcing today, I'm glad to say that every Birdi works as a mesh-networked device, right out of the box.

Most Smart Home devices need a hub with a complicated setup to connect to each other and to the internet. Not us. We've designed our solution to use the easiest and most ubiquitous ways to connect: WiFi + Bluetooth.

The reason that others had difficulty creating seamless solutions stems from the need for devices to have: 

Long battery life

Long range

Reliability

Security

We've created a unique mesh architecture on top of the ANT protocol, making us the first company to achieve all 4 without the need for a pesky hub. 

We're proud and excited to announce this innovation in engineering and to have unveiled it yesterday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. If you're here in Spain, please check us out at the ANT booth in Hall 7. Otherwise, stay tuned to our blog for a demonstration of how our mesh broadcasts emergencies across your home and into your phone.

Special thanks to Internet of Things Consortium for inviting us onstage to talk about the future of the Smart Home and to announce our newest innovation.

Sincerely, Mark & The Birdi Team

Birdi comes from the heart. No really, it does! This Valentine's Day weekend we've been distributing little love packages with Birdi Beta units inside of them.

Why? Because we ❤️ our backers. Without the support of so many people, we simply wouldn't be where we are today. It's humbling and we're honored to be able to build life-saving devices for you and your loved ones.

As we distribute more Beta units, we're able to get invaluable feedback that we use to build the best possible experience. We've also been training our custom sensors in the real world so that they continue to learn and improve. It's our goal to make the most accurate and least annoying smoke alarm out there as well as a high-precision air quality monitoring device. The good news is that we're well on our way as we continue to release more Smart Detectors.

Thanks again to all of our testers and to this smiling loving group of them.

Birdi isn’t your average hardware company. Most companies can build small then scale when they need to. For us, thats not an option because we’re here to save your life. 

Saving lives is not something we take lightly. To do this effectively, we have to have the same build process whether we’re making 10 or 10 thousand devices. And we have to ensure that there are redundancies in every aspect of the product. 

For hardware, that means tracking every sensor in every unit and testing each of them in our factories. This process is tested and validated by the global experts in life safety certification who are actively involved every step of the way. They help ensure not only that we’re doing everything the right way, but that all of our manufacturing partners continue to perform 100% according to the specifications at all times. You don’t have to trust our claims about excelling in fire and carbon monoxide detection; trust the certification authority that inspects our product and process.

My co-founder and our CTO Justin was just in our factories in China making sure that everything is getting set up properly to handle the large number of devices that are about to come their way. From streamlining assembly processes to defining test plans and quality checks, plus automating manufacturing builds, this was no small task. Thankfully, things are moving ahead according to our updated schedule and the next batch of devices is getting ready to be shipped to us before Chinese New Year begins on February 8 and the factories close for a few weeks.

This is great news for anyone who signed up for our Beta program and hasn’t gotten a device yet because it means that the next batch of devices is going to ship in mid-February. We’re excited to hear your thoughts, trusted beta testers! And everyone else stay tuned because we’ll be sharing a lot of their experiences, both good and bad, as we put the finishing touches on the Birdi experience before we ship out the full first batch. 

Thanks to everyone for your ongoing support and patience as we work through this process. Our systems are at scale and we’re looking forward to flying your Birdi to you soon. 

Sincerely, Mark & The Birdi Team

This has been an exciting year for Birdi. Our team has grown, we’ve manufactured units, and even started shipping some to our trusted Beta users.

To wrap up 2015, I’m proud to announce.... our new website! And not only that, we also have a new domain to call home. You can now find us at birdihome.com. 

We’re also unveiling the Birdi Smart Detector. Initially we called our smoke + carbon monoxide + air quality device the “Birdi Smart Air Monitor” but after a lot of user testing and feedback, we’ve moved to a new name that is simpler yet more evocative.

We hope you really like the new site as well as product name and would love to hear from you either way. As a lean startup, we launch ideas quickly for testing then pour over data to make decisions based on feedback and real results from those tests. This is taken so seriously at Birdi that Eric Ries is even one of our investors. Needless to say, your thoughts are invaluable as we continue to improve the Birdi experience.

The keen observer will notice that there’s no “app” section on our site. That’s because there’s still more exciting news to come. We’ll be unveiling it early next year. We’ll also be rolling out more Smart Detectors and doing more interviews with our Beta testers. There’s a lot planned for 2016 and we’re thrilled to be able to tell you about it when the time comes.

Until then, have a safe, healthy and happy New Year! 

This Thanksgiving there’s a lot for us at Birdi to be thankful for. As we start sending units into the wild, one of the things we’re most thankful for is our earliest supporters. 

Someone who has helped us since our earliest days has been Jason Calacanis. If you don’t already listen to his podcast on technology and startups, there are few sources that are more accurate or entertaining than This Week In Startups. Given his experience in tech, it was great to get Jason his device and get his feedback.

‏@Jason Playing with my @birdi! It's working! Spraying fake smoke with @mbelinsky... Fun! 

Getting support and advice from powerhouses like him means that we’re able to take our technology to the next level. Thanks Jason and everyone else who is helping us to really fly!

Of course, today is also Black Friday, so if you’d like to get a device of your own. Use discount code “turkey” for 20% off. Have a great (and safe) holiday!

Sincerely,

As the Birdi team starts shipping units, we’ll be checking in with some of our Beta testers over the next few weeks to see their impressions of the very first units to come from our factories. 

Our first check-in is with John G., one of the very first supporters of Birdi. His apartment is down the street from our office in San Francisco in a beautiful building overlooking the Bay. As you can see in the picture, we also got some love from his beautiful French Bulldog, Leo.

Why did you want a Birdi?

A few reasons. The device is simple and elegant, yet sophisticated. Plus, it offers a more comprehensive solution for the home. Carbon monoxide, fire and air quality. I like that it's part of the connected home yet more tastefully designed than other products. Just look at it, the look fits nicely in my home.

What do you think so far?

I like how easy it is to set up. Both physically and digitally. Not complicated at all and up and running in a few minutes. It was great. 

What would you still like to see? 

More devices. One in every room! 

Of course it’s also almost Halloween. At Birdi HQ we’re big fans of the radio show "This American Life” and so it was pretty exciting for all of us as we tuned in to the latest episode and heard a spooky story that speaks to exactly why we’re working on tackling such an important issue. But no spoilers! If you want to experience a real-life scary story and have 6 minutes to listen, tune in here. Happy trick-or-treating everyone! 

And here’s another picture of Leo to take you through the weekend because we just can't resist how cute he is: