Kevin Farrell (left) and Ian Cottingham formed Red Brain to assist in transitioning research conducted at UNL into commercially viable products.

Earlier this month, we reported on Red Brain Inc., the University of Nebraska-Lincoln spin-off that recently introduced its first product, CrimeView NEARme.

Last week, we sat down with Ian Cottingham, Red Brain’s president and co-founder, Kevin Farrell, Red Brain’s vice president and co-founder, and Alan Tomkins (left), the director of the University of Nebraska’s Public Policy Center, to take a closer look at the startup.

Silicon Prairie News: How did Red Brain get started?

Ian Cottingham: It got started from a lot of the grant research that I’d done in the computer science department. My organization develops software to support research that’s actually being done with a deliverable component as opposed to just doing pure research. One of the things I’ve observed over the course of nine years is that there’s commercial value in what’s generated beyond simply the actual research. So Kevin and I formed Red Brain basically to assist in the process of moving that kind of work product into the commercial space, so working with NUtech Ventures, and working with other researchers within the university to actually see intellectual property that could become a product, become a product. So in 2009 we created Red Brain and started essentially looking through the portfolio of grants that I was working on for a candidate product to do the first spinoff.

SPN: How did the CrimeView NEARme product get started?

IC: In 2010 Ashok Samal, a professor here at the department of computer science, approached me about an idea that Tom Casady had for law enforcement software, and immediately a light bulb goes on and says, “Yeah, this is the one we’ve been looking for to do a product based on it.”

Alan Tomkins: I think when we grabbed this group, whose interest is in developing software and taking it to market, we really benefitted the project. So it’s an interesting issue of transfer that many of us in the academy are not so familiar with.

CrimeView NEARme is the first product from Red Brain, a UNL spin-off. 

SPN: What is your role in developing this product?

IC: I’m the software architect, so I design the way the system communicates with other systems. I’m also the lead iOs developer, so I built the application for iPads and iPhones.

Kevin Farrell: I’m the lead Android and Windows developer. I get those running on Android platforms and Windows mobile data computers.

SPN: Did you ever think you’d be involved in something like this and with so much media buzz?

IC: No, I didn’t. A lot of work that one does in software at the university related to things is a little less exciting. The really interesting thing about this and the reason why I think it is so exciting is that everybody does understand law enforcement. I think one of the really great outcomes of it is that it gets people excited about what otherwise would be boring to them, which is research and the role that the university plays in generating really exciting work that benefits the community as a whole. I think a lot of times it’s easy to see the university as a research drain that takes money to do studies that aren’t important to people when in fact that is not the case. The research done at universities, particularly at this university, is a huge impact on people’s lives, so it’s really exciting for us to work on a project where people can actually see that impact in a tangible way and can get excited about it. But I didn’t imagine that I would work on something that was quite this exciting.

SPN: What’s the response been from this pilot study here with Lincoln police officers?

IC: It’s been shockingly positive actually. You always expect a certain amount of need to refine when you’re doing software. It’s rarely going to be the first time 100 percent right, and I’m not saying that it is 100 percent right. We have a much longer road map for what we want to see this product become but it’s been amazingly positive. I have yet to meet somebody in law enforcement who sees this or uses it who doesn’t have the response of “this is a game-changer.” The kind of language used to describe it and just the response that people have leads me to believe that this is exactly the right product for the time in terms of the way that technology is shifting.

CrimeView NEARme provides police officers location-based crime data while they are working in the field.

SPN: What stage are you at now with this product?

IC: As we were building it, in the back of our minds we were thinking, “How do we commercialize it? What needs to happen to make this a commercial product?” And that’s kind of where we are now. The grant funding cycle is done, the research is ongoing and now we’re looking at taking this to market.

SPN: How are you going to get the product to market?

IC: Red Brain is a software development company. We develop software projects, and that’s what we’re passionate about, and it’s what we love to do. So we don’t have a large sales force, and we don’t have an existing market pipeline or anything like that. So particularly in these early stages where we are growing and one of our goals is to organically grow. We don’t want to give up a lot of equity in this company; we want to keep this company to its group of founders. So we ended up (entering) into a partnership with them (The Omega Group), where they will do all the marketing and distribution for us. Red Brain continues to maintain ownership of the intellectual property and to develop the product based on our road map and based on the feedback that we’re getting from our customers, but Omega is actually branding it and selling it as one of their products, which brings us much more quickly to market. We have 700 agencies that are already Omega customers that could potentially become customers of NEARme.

See the video below for Cottingham and Farrell’s discussion of starting a business in Lincoln and advice for future entrepreneurs.

Credits: Screenshots courtesy of Red Brain. Photos by Kate Ellingson. Video by Kate Ellingson.