Not a monthly billboard. A placement on the machines that run the science — and in the record of every experiment they produce.
0 of 10 panels held · all open to outbid
3D view needs WebGL
Every spot is listed in the table below — nothing is hidden in the 3D view.
drag to spin · hover a panel on the machine · click to bid
Every spot shows its current top bid.
Panels open at $50 Small · $125 Medium · $250 Large, with a premium on the surfaces that appear in every photograph. Outbids must beat the standing bid by $25, and bidding decides the rest.
| Spot | Surface | Size | Held by | Current bid |
|---|
Twelve surfaces across the frame, the stations and the instrument housings, in three sizes, priced by size and by how often the thing ends up in a photograph.
The top bid at the end of the auction wins. I approve every sponsor by hand before anything appears, and I keep the final say. Refused bids are refunded in full.
Printed as die-cut vinyl and applied to the real surface, added to this 3D lab, and written into the provenance of every run that follows.
No sponsor has any input into what gets run, what gets measured, or what gets published. No sponsor sees a result before it's public. No sponsor can withdraw a finding. That's in the agreement, and it's on this page rather than buried in it.
Research that carries someone's name has to survive the question "who paid for this?" The answer is written down in advance, in public. That's the point, not the fine print.
A laptop lid is one flat surface. A lab is a place that makes things, and the things it makes carry names. That's the part nobody else is selling.
$250,000, and it is two things priced separately.
Panels open at $50 to $250, so the barrier to getting on the machine is deliberately almost nothing. Bidding decides what a panel is actually worth — on the MacBook this idea started with, a spot that opened at €125 closed at €1,715. The $50,000 milestone is the point at which the lab exists, and one sponsor can clear it alone by taking every panel at once.
The second number is not a stipend ask. It buys two years of a working lab's output, and that is what the digital inventory is for: your name in the provenance record of every run, on the 3D lab inside every replay, and on the runs themselves. A panel sells once. Runs keep happening.
Where $250,000 comes from: a fully funded doctoral student at CU costs roughly $99,000–115,000 a year, so two years plus about $50,000 of hardware lands here. For scale, NSF benchmarks an industry partner's contribution to a doctoral programme at $100,000 over four years with $25,000 up front — this asks for two years, not four, and gives you the machine as well.
The lab isn't built yet — that's the point, this is what builds it. The hardware is real hardware from a real quote. The 3D model above is the actual scene the runs replay against, not an illustration. What's genuinely uncertain is whether enough people buy a spot.
A die-cut vinyl mark on a physical surface, your logo and link on this page, your mark on the 3D lab inside the run replay, and a funder entry in the provenance record of the runs that follow.
I can't promise impressions or ROI. I can promise the placement is durable, that it's in a real working lab, and that I'll show you exactly where it is.
No, and that's deliberate. Sponsors buy visibility only — no input on what's run, measured or published, no early sight of results, no ability to pull a finding. It's written into the agreement.
Almost. Every sponsor is approved by hand and I keep the final say — it goes in a lab that publishes, after all. If a bid is refused the deposit comes back in full.
I am. Grants are slow, most of them fund people rather than the hardware those people need, and the equipment-only programmes come round once a year. This is faster, and it isn't mutually exclusive with any of it.
Everyone gets refunded. I don't want a half-bought rig and you don't want a spot on a lab that doesn't exist.
Yes. Twelve surfaces, and that's the whole inventory. When the auction closes, the marks go on and stay on for the term in the agreement.