The goal of InventionDB is to help people create great project documentation in 5 minutes or less.

2003 This project started as Michael Rosenblatt's master thesis at the MIT Media Lab in the Grassroots Invention Group. It was then called iCubes. The goal of the project was to increase the overall efficiency of research work at the 400 person Media Lab by creating a repository for frequently used or highly novel resources. Michael's thesis, The Impact of Networked Display Devices on Awareness and Adoption of an Online Knowledge Sharing System [pdf 13MB] was about the creation of this system and getting people to use it.

2004 After graduating from MIT, Michael and his longtime friend (and classmate at both CMU and MIT) Rahul Bhargava borrowed on the learnings of that early trial, and scratch-built the a new system, titled inventionDB, and made it open for free public use on the internet. The site went live in April of 2004, but as an Alpha version and not widely announced. This year Michael demonstrated InventionDB to Steve Wozniak, Apple Computer co-founder. Woz said "Wow, this could really help people get to building things again," and he was particularly excited about the application to enabling robotics projects for kids. Woz remained an advisor through 2005 until his autobiographical book release and Venture Capital activities began to consume all his time.

2005 This year was the wide public announcement of InventionDB, and we ran two project contests to get the word out. Each contest rewarded an iPod for the best project submission. These contests were won respectively by David Merrill a grad student at MIT, and Travis Gregg who at the time was the sound engineer for the Unites States Marine Corp marching band. This year we had several releases, which added features such as comments on projects, the ability to apply Creative Commons licenses to projects, built-in photo cropping, and an improved browsing interface. InventionDB was featured on several blogs, including Make Magazine, WorldChanging and Digg.com. Also, against his better judgement, Michael got a day-job in 2005. While a cool job (helping make the world's most popular digital music players), it began to divert time away from InventionDB.

2006 This was a sad year for InventionDB. Several early contributors to InventionDB development also got day-jobs, and Michael's job became really, really busy. InventionDB got attacked by spammers, and it became hard to find actual project content in a sea of annoying ads postings. Very little development and almost no bug fixes were completed in 2006. It was a sad year. On a positive note, many InventionDB users continued to publish content - thank you for your perseverance!

January 2007 This is going to be a great year. We are wrestling this project back onto the track and 2007 will be a year of exciting news and progress. Firstly, we are making InventionDB open source. In the upcoming months, we will be making the code base available for free, and will be welcoming outside developers. What this means for the users is that the public site, http://www.inventiondb.com will improve greatly as we establish a new and larger development effort. Individual users will most likely want to use this public site rather than downloading and installing their own version. However, if you are an organization (a school, club, research center, etc), you may well want to run your own internal version of our software, and we will work with you to do just that. As a precursor to new releases, we have temporarily shut down user logins to the public site while we improve security and robustness.

Thank you for reading this history, and look forward to exciting announcements in the near future.

Michael Rosenblatt michael@inventiondb.com

• Michael Rosenblatt developed the original project concept and thesis, and is the interim project leader. Michael is a graduate of MIT and Carnegie Mellon and currently works at Apple Inc. Hobbies include this project, reading, mountain biking and increasingly, writing.
• Scott Ritter is just out of Stanford University with a MS in civil engineering and currently works at Google. Scott is a self-taught web developer, and is committed to doing things he feels are important. Such is his interest in InventionDB.
• Miriam Poursaied has a background in technical sales of enterprise software systems. She will be working with us to advocate the use of InventionDB installed software among university-level learning institutions.

• Rahul Bhargava, for software development and web design.
• Hans Kieserman, for software development.
• Bakhtiar Mikhak, for continuing advisership beginning at MIT.
• Fred Martin, for advisership.
• Dan Sokol, for advisership.
• Steve Wozniak, for advisership.