Birdeez Launches from UCSB to Change the World – SB Audubon Society

Thomas Kuo

Birdeez Team Launching Into Action to Change the World!
Left to Right – Thomas Kuo, Jeff Simeon and Patrick Toerner.

El Tecolote Logo - Santa Barbara Audubon SocietyA version of this article originally appeared in the Santa Barbara Audubon Society‘s news letter – El Tecolote for June-July 2013.

If numbers are to be believed, only a quarter of those reading this sentence can identify birds. The US Fish and Wildlife Service reports that 74% of people who watch birds can identify fewer than 20 species by sight. We at Birdeez hope to change that and, in the process, change the world.

Birdeez is an iPhone app, but you can think of it as the un-iBird. Instead of being an encyclopedia, we built Birdeez to be the easiest app for anyone to pick up and start learning local birds. The app knows where you are and what birds are near you at any given time of year.  Enter a bird’s shape, size and color and you’ll get a short list of birds that match. You can even save your bird sightings right in the app. We designed it to help anyone from 7 to 70 years old learn their birds. By connecting more people to the birds around them, we hope to create the next generation of environmental stewards. Continue reading

UCSB Grads Create Winning App Birdeez – SB Independent

Santa Barbara Independent LogoEmiyl Carlson at the Santa Barbara Independent did a great write up about the team at Birdeez and our origin through UCSB. Our company is EcoLek, but for now we’re focusing bringing disruptive change to the birding market.

Their first project: an intuitive smartphone app that allows you to describe, identify, and catalog any and all bird sightings in your area, appropriately named Birdeez.

Read the rest on Santa Barbara Independent’s “For the Birds”.

An App for the Birds – UCSB’s Bren School

BrenSchoolLogoI hope to continue to make the Bren School, and the Eco-entrepreneurship Program there, proud with Birdeez!

Bird watchers know birds, right? Not necessarily, according to Jeff Simeon (MESM 2012), who says that most self-identified birders can name only twenty of the 900 bird species found in North America.

Simeon knows this from research he conducted for his Bren School Eco-E project, which was to develop and market Birdeez, a new iPhone app that makes it easy to identify, record, and share bird sightings. Things are going well for CEO and design presenter Simeon and his partners on the technical side, UCSB undergraduate economics student Patrick Toerner and PhD student Thomas Kuo, who studies computer vision.

Read the rest on the Bren School’s website.

Birdeez Makes Birdwatching/Bird Identification Easy – Social Impact Marketing

I had a chance to sit down with Robin Eschler at Social Impact Marketing after an event put on by Startup SB. She really understood what we are trying to accomplish at Birdeez and summarized it nicely:

Jeff and his team, Patrick Toerner and Thomas Kuo, also hope to improve bird conservation and help our nation deal with “Nature Deficit Disorder.” By making birdwatching easy, the hope is to get more people enjoying the hobby and sharing it with their children. By encouraging children to go outside and learn to observe, not only will kids get up from the games to go outside, they will learn to appreciate nature and conservation while having quality time with Mom and Dad.

We talked about a bunch of things from environmental education to how Birdeez will work!

Read the rest and listen to the interview at Social Impact Marketing.

UCSB’s Bren School Incubated Birdeez, Covers our NVC Win!

BrenSchoolLogoI attended UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, where I first developed the idea for Birdeez. When I met my two awesome technical co-founders, Patrick and Thomas, we had a team that could make this idea reality.

The Bren School recently featured our win at the UCSB Technology Management Program’s New Venture Competition!

A team of would-be eco-entrepreneurs, including third-year Bren School master’s student Jeffrey Simeon, received the first-place, $5,000 prize in the  market-oriented category of the competition, for his smart-phone application called “Birdeez.”

Read their perspective and about another great Bren Project on the Bren School website.