ByB Interviewed by Ray Suarez

Ray Suarez, of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, recently interviewed ByB for a TV feature on entrepreneurship, focusing on various towns in U.S. Hopefully we’ll make the cut for the show in December! Ray was a friendly fellow, asking a lot of questions about the neural signals, synapses, and cockroaches. In good humor, he posed with our humble friends (see his shoulder).

Posted: 2009-Oct-6 — Filed under: Marketing

ByB Partners with Business School

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!

Posted: 2009-Sep-30 — Filed under: Biz, Marketing

Concentrate Media interviews Backyard Brains

Concentrate Media, an Ann Arbor business magazine, recently interviewed Greg about ByB. You can read the article here.

Note: The opinions of Greg Gage do not represent the opinions of ByB. We acknowledge that insect brains and human brains are different.

Brief Primer for the newbies

-Insects don’t have mylein sheaths on their axons.

-Insects don’t really have a brain; rather, they have three fused ganglia pairs in their head

-Insects use Acetylcholine as the excitatory neurotransmitter of choice, rather than glutamate like humans.

But, like all creatures great and small, we can learn about how our brain works by studying the neurons of 340 million year old insects.

Posted: 2009-Sep-3 — Filed under: Marketing

Tim’s Demo for the Kauffman Foundation

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!

Posted: 2009-Jul-23 — Filed under: Biz, Marketing — Tags: Demo, Kauffman

SpikerBox v3 Prototype Complete!

You spoke; we listened. Version 3 of the SpikerBox is complete and fully operational. New features include: built-in Speaker, Gain Control, rapid switching between audio and recording mode, and three standard outputs: BNC, mini-stereo, and RCA. We have a couple more improvements (smaller size, smaller batteries, etc) to make, but stayed tuned. We foresee Version 4 being the market-ready version. Thanks for your patience everyone!

What did the previous versions look like? See SpikerBox1 and SpikerBox2.

Posted: 2009-Jul-15 — Filed under: Hardware, Marketing — Tags: SpikerBox

University of Michigan plugs Backyard Brains

Backyard Brains was highlighted in June 2009 by the University of Michigan News Service for the University’s Center for Entrepreneurship. The video is provided below.

Posted: 2009-Jun-25 — Filed under: Marketing — Tags: Interview, University of Michigan

Backyard Brains interviewed by the Journal Nature!

Above you can listen to the interview that Nature Magazine had with Tim and Greg about the genesis of Backyard Brains. It was featured in the November 2008 version of Nature’s Neuropod podcast.

In this light-hearted interview, we describe the need for pushing technology into the hands of amateur neuroscientists and children everywhere.

To hear more podcasts, you can visit: http://www.nature.com/neurosci/neuropod/.

Posted: 2008-Nov-20 — Filed under: Marketing — Tags: Interview, Nature, Zombies