Backyard Brains » Biz

Backyard Brains featured on Boing Boing, Boston Globe, and Nature.com

Tim — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:31:45 +0000

We have received a fair bit of press the past week related to some of the community events we have done. In June Tim spoke at the Humanity Plus Summit at Harvard on the “Rise of the Citizen Scientist.” The room was jam-packed with “trans-humanists” and Tim was interviewed for a Boston Globe piece on the open science movement.

At the recent MAKER faire in Detroit, editor-in-chief of MAKE Magazine, Mark Frauenfelder, selected us as his favorite Makers on Boing-Boing. Thanks Mark! See below for some budding neuroscientists.

Finally, we are collaborating with the Fund Science folks, to allow you, yes you, to contribute to research projects. Wonder when you do those 5K runs for cancer, where the money goes? Here you directly know. Donations to Backyard Brains would go towards paying educators to help develop our lab books and hiring coders to improve and update our iPhone/iPad educational software. A recent article in nature.com speaks about this funky new concept. Don’t worry, rest assured we at Backyard Brains are decidedly poor (not paying ourselves yet); you’re not donating to a company like AIG, which you already did, in a round-about way.

The Grant Cycle is Over, and it’s now Dr. Gage

Tim — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:58:26 +0000

Backyard Brains has been rather quiet over the holiday season, but we’ve been busy behind the scenes. Notably, co-founder Gregory Gage successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation in Biomedical Engineering on December 22nd. Congrats!

Backyard Brains also met David Egner, head of the New Economy Initiative in Michigan, which is a sponsor of Tim’s Kauffman Postdoctoral Fellowship. Tim and David discussed the possibility of a Michigan Postdoctoral Program to fund recent Ph.D.s from Michigan schools to start companies.

Backyard Brains also moved out its old digs in the basement of the TechArb into the new location near the Google Offices on the fourth floor of the building at Liberty and Division…

..while we still make our final choices on chip selection for our first run of SpikerBoxes. Thanks for your patience everyone!

This Saturday (January 9th) also marked the end of the 6 week long grant run. We submitted three SBIR’s: 1 to the NSF, 1 to the NIH, and 1 to the Department of Education. In additional we submitted a few smaller grants: the GLEQ competition, the Advanced E-Team Grant, and finished a feasibility analysis for the the Dare to Dream Assessment competition. The Department of Education SBIR was turned in with five minutes to spare….

Now back to the fun stuff of hardware and experiment design….

A Michigan Life Preserver? Backyard Brains and Ann Arbor featured on PBS

Greg — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:07:32 +0000

As you know, Backyard Brains is a small start-up in the struggling state of Michigan. Last month, Ray Suarez and the crew from PBS came to highlight Ann Arbor, as one type of city in it’s Patchwork Nation project. The scope of this project is add granularity to gross segmentation of “blue states” vs. “read states”, and they have identified 12 types of places across the US, including: Evangelical Epicenters, Empty Nests, Boom Towns, etc.

Each of the 12 region types were highlighted by choosing a city and focusing attention on some aspect of life there. Ann Arbor was chosen as the quintessential “Campus and Careers” city, so PBS focused on how Ann Arbor is surviving in a turbulent Michigan economy. Backyard Brains does make a brief cameo in the beginning. Enjoy!

ByB has First Sale, First Field Test!

Tim — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:13:24 +0000

With elbow grease and many hours at his workshop then he would care to admit, Tim of ByB hunkered down and made a new SpikerBox by hand last week (as we finalize our production design), for an impending hard deadline of delivery by November 9th. Tim was sad to see this SpikerBox go..it was his best one yet!

But, a professor in Minnesota wanted one for a “teaching biology” course she was running this past weekend, so it was delivery by then or wait till next Spring! ByB got it out just in time, and we have our fingers crossed for the feedback!

Now on to getting those PCB’s completed….

ByB Founders Published auf Deutsche!

Tim — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:02:01 +0000

In a previous life, during our graduate work, Greg and Tim (along with co-conspirator Hirak Parikh), presented satirical neuroscience posters at the Society for Neuroscience conference. These eventually turned into papers in the Annals of Improbable Research (read about Stock Market Neurons and the Cingularity Apocalypse at your leisure), but our good friend Manfred Spitzer recently translated these works in German and published them in a book packed with tongue-in-cheek articles on neuroscience. Contribute to the Backyard Brains R&D fund! You can purchase the book here. A small bit of royalties go to us, and this will pour right into ByB, and ultimately straight back to you, fellow SpikerFriends!

ByB Interview by Inc. Magazine

Tim — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:21:06 +0000

As part of the new Kauffman Labs initiative, Tim of ByB was recently interviewed by Inc. Magazine. In 20 years, Tim hopes his last 7 years will be obsolete to the tune of scientific progress. Then, Oh Brave New World!, onwards to the declarative memory problem.

ByB Partners with Business School

Tim — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:11:19 +0000

ByB applied last week to the second stage of the Zell Institute Dare to Dream grant. This grant, should we get it, will give us some funds for our initial runs of SpikerBoxes (stay tuned…we are close to final production). The grant, run every school semester by the UM Ross Business School, has three stages, from initial idea (design), to business hypothesis (assessment), to full blown business plan (integration). Once you get past the design stage, you have to partner with a business school student(s).

But, Tim and Greg are gearheads! We wouldn’t know what to do with a value chain diagram if one landed on our coxa! We don’t much hang around that part of campus. But have no fear. ByB, harking back to its renegade origins, went to the lobby of the business school to do some cold recruiting. Connie Chung and her team, through the persuasive cold pitching of Greg, joined ByB as partners for the grant. You can see us working at the local Expresso Royale on South U below. Wish us luck; we hear next week. Thanks Connie!

Demo at Ripple

Tim — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:24:18 +0000

While Tim was on a roadtrip for an interview with the Kauffman foundation, he made a pit stop in Salt Lake City to visit some friends at Ripple. While we at Backyard Brains pride ourselves on our single channel neurophysiology, the engineers at Ripple are designing a >1000 channel neurophysiology system! We picked their brains (using language of course), and you can see Shane Guillory skeptically analyzing the output of our SpikerBox:

The folks at Ripple are enthusiastic about ByB, and kindly offered up some help on circuit design, publicity, and partnering at conferences. Look for us occasionally hanging out at the Ripple booth at SfN in Chicago. There may be some new implementations of Mind War…. Thanks for lunch guys!

Tim’s Demo for the Kauffman Foundation

Greg — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:55:19 +0000

Tim spent the tail end of last week in Kansas City, MO. Here is the demo he made while visiting the Kauffman Foundation as a finalist. Tim is applying for the Kauffman Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship program. We here at ByB wish him the best of luck!