Backyard Brains sells 500th SpikerBox, is awarded NIH Grant, and lowers prices for summer

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 breakdown on our finance page and map. In short, of the 510 SpikerBoxes we have shipped to 183 unique customers, 218 have been preassembled by us, and 292 have been where users build the SpikerBox themselves.

This operation has been a labor of love for us (working out of our living rooms and mother-in-law’s basement), and after 2.5 years of plugging away, we announce we are now ready to expand our team. We were recently awarded an NIMH SBIR grant: “Bringing Neurophysiology into Secondary Schools” to allow us to professionalize all our educational materials as well as build some new prototypes. We are currently recruiting to add a software developer and educator to our team. We thank the U.S. National Government for believing in our mission, and, of course, you the taxpayer!

And we want to thank you with more than a kind word. For the summer, we announce our first sale. The SpikerBox and Bag of Parts prices have now been lowered 10% to get neurophysiology into the hands of more and more people. We shall keep experimenting with production techniques to continue making neuroscience inquiry as affordable as possible.

To the NeuroRevolution!

-Tim & Greg

Posted: 2011-Jun-17 — Filed under: Biz,Marketing,Outreach

Backyard Brains sells to 100th customer

We are pleased to announce that ProfessorMichael Ferragamo of Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota is our 100th customer! He is the proud owner of SpikerBox #266 (some customers have bought more than one!). Michael plans to use his SpikerBox for local high school outreach.

So where on this great planet have all these 266 little SpikerBoxes gone? We introduce our interactive SpikerMap. University professors are orange, graduate students are brown, amateur scientists are yellow, and our high school teachers are green. Some SpikerBoxes have even found their way to Alaska, South Korea, Germany, Holland, France, and England.

Note: We are aware that Pittsburgh is not in Wisconsin. During Thanksgiving, Professor Doug Weber single- handedly formed a satellite neural engineering department at his nephew’s house. You might also ask: Where is the first ever production SpikerBox that began this adventure? It’s owned and used by the hip graduate students of the University of California – San Diego Neuroscience Program.

As the SpikerBoxes have made their way around the world, we have been continually developing and improving the design. Since sales first began in April 2010, we have released four iterations of the SpikerBox. Here is what the current SpikerBox looks like (note the stylishacornnuts and acrylic housing).

We thank all the customers who have maintained and supported our dream of low cost electrophysiology for all.

Posted: 2011-Jan-26 — Filed under: Marketing — Tags: Spikes on the Planet

Backyard Brains appears in Wired Magazine

For the past nine years, Tim has had a subscription to Wired Magazine, and he always read the articles on the internet revolution, learning about the drama, personalities, and technology involved with the rapidly changing world of computers. Longingly, he has despaired, wishing neuroscience and biology R&D could be similarly fast with low barriers to entry. We at Backyard Brains are trying to change that, and so it was a special treat this month to be included in the print version of Wired. If you strain your eyes on page 153, you’ll see a postage stamp sized picture of the SpikerBox in the 100 geek gifts for the holidays. Perhaps the soldering iron will replace the wiimote for some folks this year [Disclosure: we love the wii too and take no political/intellectual stance regarding video games].

We also recently returned from the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego (full post coming soon as we round up the pictures), and we give thanks for the Society for sponsoring our trip through the Next Generation Award,and to the Journal Neuron, which also sponsored us through the Anuradha Rao Memorial Travel Award. We’re working hard; thanks true believers!

Posted: 2010-Nov-27 — Filed under: Marketing