Brian Parks


Long time, no write

09 Nov 2010

Well, it’s been a while. Truth of the matter is that I’ve been incredibly busy. That’s what happens when you’re working a full-time job and start your own company (which amounts to another full-time job plus some extra, all of which you don’t get paid for immediately) along with some other extra academia-related items that have a tendency to take up some more time.

Good news is that the comoany’s starting to take off. The initial iPhone app was a success, but we underestimated the potential of the business model we were after, so it’s been a mixed bag. We’ve proven to ourselves (and our potential customers) that we can carry out the work we say we can carry out in a timely fashion and we have a sample iPhone app that we can use as a demo for that line of products and similar efforts.

Our second success is the release of BlindSpotter, a physiologic blind spot mapper designed to be used by the relatively niche and captive market of Functional Neurologists. Not much can be said due to the whole corporate environment and a desire to refrain from making statements that may or may not end up being true in the future, but we have some contacts and things are looking good.

Our Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) effort is steaming ahead quite well, which should provide (assuming we win the award) a little bit of money for some fun research down the road. We’re also about to start on another contract which should benefit both the company and our grad student pockets.

So far, the company is looking to be a Good Idea, and my goals for the end of our first year in business are turning a profit (a real profit, as in, we can start paying ourselves a decent salary for the work we do) and thinking about moving into a real office and possibly expanding. If some of the projects we’re currently starting turn out, even if not in the way we currently intend for them to turn out, those goals could be here sooner than expected.

I know I’m not doing real well at keeping in touch with everybody from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but I haven’t forgotten. I just haven’t had the time. Expect some phone calls in the next few weeks. Hopefully I’ll be able to wiggle a few minutes into my schedule here and there. I keep telling people not to ask me about free time; I don’t have any. Ask me about unscheduled time, and I’ll make sure I’m not doing anything else for that time slot. When I’m not busy doing something scheduled, I guarantee there’s something else that can keep me busy that needs to get done.

Oh, right…I almost forgot. Today is our first day of semi-frozen precipitation. I suppose it’s snow, but it’s not sticking real well. It appears that by this time last year, we’d already gotten some snow and it had already melted. This fall has been unusual for Colorado, but I’m told that there’s no such thing as “usual” weather patterns for Colorado. At some point it gets cold and maybe snows; we call that winter. Sometime after that, it gets warm again and stays sunny for a while; we call that summer. The two windy spells in between are called spring and fall. Weather can’t be predicted; it just happens.

Were this a real blog, I’d suggest leaving comments letting me know what you’re up to. Unfortunately, it’s not, so you can’t. Instead, I recommend giving me a call or sending me an email unless I beat you to it. Maybe I’ll acknowledge it. No promises on when the next update will be.