We began distributing SpikerBoxes on April 8th, 2010, and we are proud to announce that on June 15th, 2011, we shipped our 500th SpikerBox! The proud owner is a high school teacher in Minnesota who ordered 12 “Bags of Parts” for students to build and experiment with this summer. You can see our complete user […]

Finances are on our collective minds as we all hurry to send in our taxes to the IRS this week, therefore we think this is a great time to announce somefinancialnews of our own. Starting with this year’s tax filing, we are making Backyard Brains open books, meaning that all employees (both of us) and […]

In a deal noted by many industry insiders as “a neurotechnology coup,” Karl Deisseroth, professor and physician at Stanford, has moved to Detroit, MI to join Backyard Brains as its first salaried employee. Vinod Khosla, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, noted "it’s common practice for high tech firms in the Bay Area, whether SquareUp or Anybot, to […]

We’ve been busy in the trenches of our R&D department designing a working prototype of the “RoboRoach,” a remote control system to enable left and right turning in running cockroaches. This began as a University of Michigan Senior Engineering Project we sponsored in Winter 2010, and over the past year we’ve incrementally been working to […]

Perhaps, dear customer, you wonder how we keep costs low? Here we remove the curtain off our factory floor to show our production staff: We offer door to door bus service: We have found that small hands are optimal for cutting the circuit boards: Taking a hint from our friends at Hewlett-Pakard (recent firing decision aside), we use […]

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 […]

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. […]

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” […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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, […]