About

Staff

• Neo Menlo: Master Administrator
• IN5OMNI4C: Moderator

Our Purpose

In short, Neo Menlo is a community in which its own members submit ideas and they are thought through, planned, and discussed by the rest of the community. Most importantly, the invention is still the creator's property. The assistance by the community is repaid by assisting the community. Everyone wins.

The origin of the name Neo Menlo derives from the Greek prefix Neo, meaning rebirth in modern form, and Menlo, coming from the name of Thomas Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park. The decision to create an organization for inventors came from the personal experience, where the creator was randomly inspired for unusual inventions. If the wasted inspirations of many people could be considered, progress could be made.

Many do not realize that Thomas Edison was not the only person who worked on inventions in his laboratories; it was actually a community of scientists working together. His laboratory included over 60 employees.

"Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged."
"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. " (Thomas Edison)

The purpose of Neo Menlo is to provide its members with enough assistance to help overcome any discouragements, in hopes that these inventions, which might never have been created by their inventors, will improve the lives of people all over the world.

At one time, a computer could become obsolete in less than a year. Computer technology has been almost stagnant for a half a decade. This is because technology in general has lacked originality for quite some time. Instead, engineers have been improving the same thing until there is nothing else to improve. Proof of this can be seen in the number of patent filed and issued in the last five years

More and more people are applying for patents and not receiving them. There are plenty of reasons why a patent might not be accepted. Perhaps it is not original. Maybe the inventor did not go into enough detail. This is what Neo Menlo wishes to stop. We want to help the planning of inventions and work through design issues to make inventions practical. The staff at Neo Menlo hopes that their site becomes a powerful tool for both every day inventors and the experienced.

Keeping the community’s ideas secure is of utmost importance to the staff at Neo Menlo. Precautions taken for security include backups of forum, encryption, and IP tracking. In the event of a serious alienation of a users intellectual property, IP addresses and other information will be given to authorities on request. The staff can see how many users use the same IP as the user in the user’s profile to prevent banned members from coming back with another name. The MySQL database is downloaded periodically for backup purposes. Hopefully, the information contained on the backups may be of use in a court of law. The database is stored on an external drive connected to an unspecified computer and the database has two layers of encryption to prevent hackers from changing information in their favor. As a user of the forum, it is suggested to use simple encryption software. A great example would be LockNote. LockNote works like notepad. Just copy and paste your post and decide on a password and save it. Most importantly about this software is that any computer can view it with the right password without downloading any .exe. This separates it from many because you may need the exact same software installed on the computer in order to decrypt it. In the event that your computer was attacked, the information could be recovered even if you don’t remember what software you used. Since it would be dangerous to keep your password saved on a computer or even written down somewhere, I personally would recommend making it a password you can remember, even if you use it in other places. Simple encryption is better than no encryption.

Citation

Erica Werner. Associated Press. Oct. 22, 2005. link

Steganos. GmbH. 2006. Privacy Software Made Easy. link

Wikipedia. Neo-. 2006 link

Wikipedia. Thomas Edison. 2006 link