Neuron Robotics

Oscar the TrashBot

Oscar the TrashBot

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Oscar the Trash Bot - Final Setup

Oscar the Trash Bot - Final Setup

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Tutorial: Eclipse Setup for the NRDK

Tutorial: Eclipse Setup for the NRDK

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Neuron Robotics Hexapod Algorithm Update

Neuron Robotics Hexapod Algorithm Update!

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Tips on Assembling the Neuron Robotics Hexapod

Tips on Assembling the Neuron Robotics Hexapod!

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Introduction to Neuron Robotics

An introduction ....

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Mass Challenge and Our Patent

We've applied to the 2011 Mass Challenge!

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Announcing the First Major Sales of DyIOs

Announcing the sale of 190 DyIOs to Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) for the 2012 academic year.

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ShutUp and StartUp Weekend

This great event was held on October 22nd and 23rd at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge. We have been to this venue several times and love it.
The event encompassed two days. The first was a lecture and buffet dinner with networking. The second was lunch, then a work session with mentoring, and a job fair, followed by more networking.
The first night's lecturers were:

• Michael J. Hagen of SCVNGR,
• Jason Evanish of Greenhorn Connect,
• Aaron Gerry of Zazu
• Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix Partners, and,
• Secretary Greg Bialecki, representing the Commonwealth

On the first night, we met:

• Brian Lynn of BookBlunder,
• James Lamarche, a student at Wentworth,
• Lisa Reilly of The Yellow Brick Road Foundation,
• Luis Carrasco, a student at my alma mater (Boston University! Go Terriers!)
• Mikhail Gurevich, who is a classmate with Luis (above) and Wes (below). They are also founders of I-NVS,
• Thomas Fuller (pictured on page 7 of that link), another Wentworth student, and,
• Wesley Griswold, who is also at BU

We saw these old friends:

• Abby Fichtner of Microsoft,
• Joselin Mane of LITBeL Consulting, and,
• R. Colin Kennedy.

On the second day, there was the Job Fair. So of course we brought the hexapod with us. What, you say? Doesn't everyone bring a six-legged walking robot to a job fair?
At the job fair, we met:

• Aditya Jain, another student at my alma mater,
• Andy Marx of eHana,
• Diane Williams,
• Elaine Yuan,
• Kevin McCarthy of Pinyadda/Boston Innovation,
• Patrick Camacho of 38 Media Design,
• Robert Schuman,
• Ms. Ryan Mitchell, a Web Developer at Harvard, and,
• Spencer Frazier who is graduating from Boston College next year

We also saw these old friends:

• Cheryl Morris of Pinyadda/Boston Innovation and
• Bobbie Carlton of Mass Innovation Nights, who gave us some great information on an upcoming Steam Punk exhibition at the Charles River Museum of Industry.

We had a good time, and a lot of people seemed to really love the hexapod. We even picked up some resumes from some extremely interesting possible job candidates. Right now we are looking to fix some software development issues and would love to bring in someone with that skill set (plus other skills). We're a growing company! Come grow with us.

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Mass Innovation September 15, 2010 Review

Mass Innovation was great fun! We had a marvelous time and hope you did, too. As always, many, many thanks to Bobbie Carlton and Dan Englander, and to Microsoft! Here's what you might have missed.

Experts -- I mean, Events -- Corner

• Boston World Partnerships — A non-profit organization, created by Mayor Thomas M. Menino to raise global awareness of Boston. Its mantra is: Inform and Connect
• BREW — Boston Region Entrepreneurship Week is going to be between October 13th and 21st. Are you hosting an event?
• Greenhorn Connect — Boston’s Entrepreneur Hub for Resources, Events and Organizations. We're happy to say we've been covered by them!
• Mass High Tech events — MHT runs its own events, and will also put yours on their calendar. Their future events include their upcoming “Demos with a capital “M”: Networking and Digital Marketing Demo Night” on October 7 as part of FutureM. Mass Innovation Nights friends get a discount! (Use code DKPL8116 when you register.)
• MIT Enterprise Forum is working to build our innovation economy.
• Todd Van Hoosear he's a Social Media Club Boston Founder, LaunchCamp organizer, and the VP of Social Media for Publicity Club of New England. He also writes for Fresh Ground. Here's an example of one of the many incredibly useful nuggets of information that Todd shares on a regular basis. I suspect Todd does not sleep.
• Workbar has flexible, shared office space for today’s mobile professionals offering flexible month to month leasing arrangements.

The Other Presentations

• LogMeIn's join.me enables impromptu meetings from across the hall or around the globe.
• TrustedOnes scores decisions -- good, bad, indifferent and godawful. And,
• Vizit is a revolutionary digital photo frame, which takes advantage of mobile network coverage.

All of the Other Great Companies at Mass Inno

• Convention Center Store has detailed information on all sorts of convention venues, plus a means of ordering whatever you could possibly need to make your event or booth a success -- even swag. Gwyn Thakur is the founder.
• Cuccicoos makes a sweet set of iPhone and iPod (plus other products) covers that not only protect, they also clean screens. The designs were really cute -- I think I appreciate such things more than the guys do.
• Internet Kit Trade Show lets you easily get computers set up at trade shows, and more!
• Novell Cloud Manager helps you to manage cloud computing processes.
• ParallelCities is a mobile and social networking platform. Elizabeth Tang is the marketer (she has the same role that I do!) and Sidi Gomes is the founder.
• Plyopower is a cardio program for your legs. Regina DeLuca is the founder.
• StarStreet is a sports stock market. Buy and sell virtual shares of players! I wonder if anyone in New England will give me anything for A-Rod? Founder Jeremy Levine assures me that you can get into their Beta with the code MassInno and see if you can get a plug nickel for the -- boo, hiss -- quintessential Yankee.

Our Presentation

I think I'm not the greatest camera person. Actually -- scratch that -- I know, for a fact, that my videocam skills are suboptimal. So, a great big thank you goes out to BostInnovation for taking excellent video of much of Bob's presentation. And thank you to Cheryl Morris for her recap of the event.
Bob's talk centered around the fact that a lot of people have a perception of robots that's colored by Hollywood. We think Rosie from the Jetsons, or R2D2 (Nadia Nassif mentioned Small Wonder's Vikki), but the reality is that robots are, how shall we put this? Lamer than that.
Yes, it's true. They're lamer. They are industrial drones or basically just arms. But what people don't think of as robots, can be classified as such. Like some high-end cars. BMW (We swear we're not sponsored by BMW. Yet.) makes a vehicle that detects how closely you're following a vehicle ahead of you and will adjust your cruise control speed accordingly, then speed you back up once the spacing allows it. Or your home -- do you have central air conditioning? If you do, it will click on and off depending upon the ambient temperature of your home. This is, essentially, a form of robotic control.
And when people want to make a robot-like device or toy, they often think of the end product, but the reality is that there's too much in the way. So much of the time, you end up reinventing the wheel, as the essential system allowing you to get your robot and your computer to speak to one another is lacking. That's where Neuron Robotics and the Bowler Communications System come in.
The BCS allows you to have your computer and robot talking quickly. How quickly? It's an eight minute experience -- a point that caught the attention of a great deal of the audience. And who doesn't want fast?
Bob concluded by, of course, talking about the DyIO and about our vision of interoperability. We want to be an essential robotics developmental platform. We want to be your go-to when you think about putting together a robotic device.
The talk went over well. The BMW line in particular got a laugh. Bob had high energy and the audience seemed captivated. And, yes, there was even a joke about the eight-minute experience -- Sean Boyce only has time to build a robot unless it takes 3.5 minutes. For you, Sean, we'll see what we can do.

New Friends!

Wherever we go, it seems, we make new friends. Here are some of the terrific people we met.

• Eric Andersen is a Senior I/T Architect and Consultant for IBM Global Services in Cambridge Massachusetts. He's an avid tweeter and has been very kind about mentioning us on Twitter! Be sure to follow him -- he knows so much!
• Heinz Bachmann is an Electrical Engineer who loves solving RF, microwave and wireless problems -- particularly strange and unusual problems.
• Caleb Barlow is the Director of Small Business Solutions at IBM. He podcasts!
• David Barron is a technology consultant.
• Josh Berg runs an online personalized shopping mall.
• Mick Darling blogs about trends in tech, business and politics.
• Daniel Davis is the Director of Life Sciences at Accounting Management Solutions.
• Andrew Drane is the Senior Web Developer at Better Lesson
• Janet Egan is a fabulous writer (and I'm not just saying that 'cause she wrote such nice things about us). We Janets must stick together!
• Barb Finer helps companies differentiate their products and penetrate their markets.
• Jon Frisch is focused on new business and client relationship management at T3, his real estate firm.
• Jason Gleason is the Lead .NET Engineer at HealthcareSource -- and he really likes robots.
• Elli St. George Godfrey is an entrepreneurial coach and the coauthor of the upcoming book, When Life Happens. Good luck with the book!
• David Haith is a BAFTA award winning Creative Director and was co-founder of two major digital studios in London during the 1990's.
• Matthew Harris is a Principal at Red Point Studios.
• Christopher Herot blogs about communications and social media.
• Darnley Howard is the President of Advansa International.
• Gregory Huang is the Editor of Xconomy Boston and National IT Editor. He's a journalist reporting on technology, business, and science.
• Kenneth Kozik is a patent attorney.
• Sean Laurence's favorite charity is One Laptop Per Child. I think I'll go check out OLPC, too.
• Scott Leonard is another Principal at Red Point Studios.
• Jeremy Levine is trading Tom Brady on his sports stock market. Does Gisele know?
• Tony Loftis is a Project Manager who works in global sales and service.
• Maureen Mansfield knows all the secrets to great travel!
• Connie Michener -- psst I think she wants a hexapod for Christmas ....
• Cheryl Morris writes for BostInnovation.
• Nadia Nassif is a Principal at Springboards Language Training and Consulting.
• Lex Nemzer is a small-batch coffee roaster. I can guarantee that he makes better coffee than I do.
• Peter Reilly is a CPA.
• Pardees Safizadeh is the Director of Social Media at Greenhorn Connect.
• Stanley Shein is a Co-Founder and Director at C-Level Clone.
• James Walker is another Director at C-Level Clone. They provide expertise on business-based financial solutions.
• Rachel is also known as Wishew
• Connie Wright is Managing Director at Accounting Management Solutions.
• Lori Yarvis is an attorney focusing on small businesses. And,
• Lihua Zou is a student.

Familiar Faces!

It's always great to see our friends. They make every event so much easier and more fun.

• Robert Adelson is an attorney
• Stacie Andrews runs the Meet Impact Calendar.
• Josh Bob is the founder and principal of Textaurant.
• Eric Braun runs the South Shore Innovation space.
• Rodney Brown reports and photographs for Mass High Tech. He took a great photo of Bob and me!
• Mike Burtov runs ONY group.
• Mike Cohen is one of the principals of the VC Ready Law Group.
• Andrea Dacayanan runs One Fast Bite.
• Jeff Del Papa runs the New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society (The NERDs!). He wanted to know how much G-force the DyIO can stand. That would be an interesting experiment.
• Jason Evanish runs Greenhorn Connect. They have an events calendar and more, and even profiled us!
• Abby Fichtner works for the Microsoft BizSpark program.
• David Fogel - need a CFO for hire? Ask him.
• Allison Friedman runs Rate It Green, whereby you can check just how ecologically conscious a company is.
• Paul Geffen is an engineer for Bit9.
• Cynthia Gilbert is a patent attorney.
• Nick Goggans works to improve communications and make them more effective.
• Ben Hron is the other principal of the VC Ready Law Group.
• Kelley Kassa is a terrific writer!
• R. Colin Kennedy is a co-founder of Invizual.
• Rick Kollmeyer works to help innovators refine and perfect their ideas.
• Joselin Mane broadcasts every week about TweetUps in the Boston/Cambridge area.
• Marlin May has a brand-spankin' new job! He took a photo of Kevin and me!
• Jon Michaeli is a VP at Quno.
• Ricart Prats is a software engineering management professional
• Richard Reinertsen and I used to work together at Fidelity Investments.
• Yilmaz Rona is an financial advisor.
• Rich Sands works to help companies build and sustain buzz.
• Brian Selchick is our lawyer!
• Masoud Shadravan is a software engineer with a brand-spankin' new job!
• Christine Sierra is a media consultant.
• Mark Sprague works to help companies drive customers to their websites.
• Margery Stegman is a communications specialist.
• Marsh Sutherland can help you easily grow your social network.
• Chuck Tanowitz is one of the principals of Fresh Ground Communications.
• Todd Van Hoosear is the other principal of Fresh Ground Communications, and,
• Marcia Weiss helps executives communicate better and more effectively.

Where to Now?

It looks like we'll have something planned for late October. I don't have a lot of information yet, or even if it will be open to the public. I will have some appearances around the Boston-Cambridge-Waltham area as well. Plus we are going to be working on getting settled into our new incubator space. I'm sure I'll be blogging a bit about how that goes.
Thank you again for all of your kind support. We greatly appreciate it, and we know that we could not have been voted in to present at Mass Innovation without the kind and generous support of all of you.
This is but the beginning.

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Beyond Robotics Video Posted

If you weren't able to attend our event or just want to relive the talk that Greg gave, check out the video of his talk.

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A Review of Our First Event

Last Friday night (June 11, 2010), we hosted our first event to promote Neuron Robotics. We learned lessons from it and will definitely make our next one even better. Yes, there will most certainly be a next one.
Our President, Robert Breznak, and I each brought a DyIO and we talked about not only it but also the Bowler Communications System (BCS). Our Development Lead, Kevin Harrington, did an excellent job of explaining not only the DyIO and the Bowler Communications System but also how the company was initially put together.
We feel our guests were impressed (we were certainly impressed with our guests!). We made friends with Emmanuel Bamfo, who runs Quad Connect, and Matt Howes of Rise Tribe. Quad Connect is a calendaring system for students to keep a schedule of not only classes and examinations but also suggested social events, including somewhat out of the ordinary ones like poetry slams. Rise Tribe is a community to help its members track and attain their personal goals, such as becoming more fit or less shy.
Plus we had a great time -- we just enjoy each others' company, which is a wonderful way to work. A special thank you and shout out to the lovely and terrific Paula who joined and supported us. Thanks, Paula!
And thank you for reading. We'll have another event soon -- and you're invited!

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We're Now Patent Pending

As of today, we have filed our patent application for the Bowler Communication System (BCS). We've been going back and fourth to finalize it with our team from Lahive and Cockfield. The filing was one of the last major pieces that required us to keep the BCS under-wraps, so expect to see more information on the system, our products and more!

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