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

A 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.

When I started at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, I wanted to find an idea to change the world for the better. Joining the Audubon Society in rural Virginia when I was 11, I know my long-term interest in the environment was inspired by my direct observation of birds. I also observed that mobile technology has been changing people’s lives, but unfortunately most people use it to detach even further from the natural world.  At Bren, I began looking for an idea to that would do the opposite––plug people back into nature. Birds seemed like the golden opportunity, and that led to Birdeez.

If Birdeez was hatched at Bren, it was incubated in the Technology Management Program  (TMP) at UCSB. That program and its New Venture Competition gave me the chance to connect with fellow UCSB students Patrick Toerner and Thomas Kuo. Working together, we have what it takes to make this idea a reality. A year ago in May, Birdeez won first place at the New Venture Competition.

Last October at a Silicon Valley event called DEMO, we launched Birdeez. We even won over the tech crowd to be selected as one of the five best presentations at DEMO.

We have a long way to go to change the world, but we’ve certainly started. Since DEMO, Birdeez has been downloaded thousands of times nationwide. We’ve been using it with groups of children to introduce them to the world of birds. We hope you’ll help us by using Birdeez with your kids and grandkids.

Birdeez is available for iPhone at GetBirdeez.com. Let us know what you think and shoot me an email anytime at Jeff@GetBirdeez.com.

Joined onstage by a live falcon to help prove their product, the team of UC Santa Barbara alumni behind bird-identification app Birdeez took a top award at last fall’s DEMO conference, a prestigious Silicon Valley pitch competition.

So landed another proverbial feather in the cap of UCSB’s Technology Management Program (TMP). The Birdeez group –– at the time still students –– won TMP’s New Venture Competition mere months earlier, earning acclaim and cash to go with their potentially viable business. Future TMP-bred winners of the popular campus start-up contest may walk away with another prize still: a master’s degree.

Read the rest about this innovative program that launched Birdeez on UCSB’s Website, or the Santa Barbara Independent.

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”.

A team of UC Santa Barbara alumni that took first place in the 2012 New Venture Competition market track has landed a DEMOgod award for their app Birdeez at the DEMO Fall 2012 competition.

Well, that’s just true. We guess we won’t fight it.

Read the rest of their coverage on the UCSB Engineering website.

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.

To read a short summary, check out the information on UCTV

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.

Birdeez, a smart phone social networking application, has become popular already with bird watchers who can use the app to identify and report sightings. Birdeez project members are working to secure funding to further their venture.

Well, that’s not quite true. We’re just getting started, but she is right on when it comes to funding. And I like where she is going with our popularity among bird watchers too!

Read about the New Venture Competition and aPeel Technology on the Independent.

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.

Teams faced extensive questioning following their presentations as judges proposed major points of concern, such as the questionable amount of market demand faced by Birdeez.

When the bird watching-enthusiast company received their first place prize of $5,000, TMP Program Manager Mike Panesis said the team was most impressive for its ability to overcome some of the greatest doubt facing competitors.

Read the rest of the great NVC coverage at the Daily Nexus.