Urban agriculture is very popular in China now, with the increasing concern about food security.
Viti-cool is a startup project that provide wireless sensors and related mobile app for people interested in urban agriculture and viticulture. I got the idea when I saw many vineyards in my hometown were monitoring the plant inaccurately and inefficiently. After several months’ market research and product development, Viti-cool was born. It is a smart solar-powered wireless sensor network, which helps farmers take care of plants easily by collecting important plant parameters and controlling growing environment. The project is now in one of the incubators of Tsinghua University, and we are refining the business model to make it even more attractive to urban agriculture. People who are doing urban agriculture in China are mainly white collar in the city. They rent fields near city but seldom have time to take care of the crops. Our product aim to help them monitor and irrigate their plants remotely by sensors and mobile app.
As the product manager and main developer, I developed prototype of the product using Raspberry Pi and online data cloud. We plan to build 5 acre of high tech equipped field around the city after we get venture capital, and start our business next year.