As seen in the Bucks County Courier Times:

Designing company

Amid the clutter of gadgets and whatnots covering the desks at the Imet Corp., ideas become reality.

The Newtown Township technology firm helps inventors overcome the hurdles of taking their projects from design to completion, an almost insurmountable task they say most inventors never complete.

"It's almost impossible," said company President Joseph Petrella Jr. "Everything's stacked against you. But it is done."

Petrella and chief technology officer Tom Krol met at The College of New Jersey when they were students. Their first project was for an English class.

They created Imet while they were still in college. The company's first endeavor was to create a voice-operated landline telephone for those with disabilities. The project never made it out of the testing phase because of money issues, but it's still a pet project.

Imet, located in the Newtown Business Commons industrial park, has five employees and is a privately held company. Over the past year, they've had about 20 clients, Petrella said.

Petrella, 24, who lives in Hunterdon County, N.J., also developed a handgun safety device that requires the person firing the gun to wear a special glove to unlock the safety.

Something like that might have saved the life of Newtown police Officer Brian Gregg, had it been available, Petrella said. Gregg was killed Sept. 29 in St. Mary Medical Center's emergency room, where he and fellow Newtown cop James Warunek had taken drunken driving suspect Robert Flor for blood and urine tests. Flor allegedly grabbed Warunek's gun, shot Gregg three times and wounded Warunek, an ER worker and himself.

Petrella designed the safety lock about five years ago, when smart-gun technology was making headlines. He received the patent in 2002, but he's been unsuccessful in marketing the product to gun manufacturers. He's hoping police departments take interest.

"The thing that frustrates me is when I see simple problems made only complex," Petrella said. "There's gotta be a better way, and that's the engineer talking."

Petrella said he hasn't had a lot of time to market his invention, because Imet has been so busy with inventors and with its other client base, industrial firms that need mechanical or electrical design help.

Petrella said he can't disclose any projects Imet has worked on, or even those that Imet has rejected. (He did note that the company has received some "pretty far-out ideas," including some that dealt with levitation.)

"You have inventions that are certainly incredible inventions but may not be marketable," he said.

"Then you have inventions that you say, 'Why didn't I think of that?' that are maybe not a great leap of technology," he said. "Those inventions are the ones you can't live without, ones that take an existing technology and improve upon them a little bit to make a new product or a new market application. Those are really the ones that are usually incredibly successful and take the least to push forward as well."

Crissa Shoemaker can be reached at 215-949-4192 or cshoemaker@phillyBurbs.com .

Courtesy Bucks County Courier Times

Picture by Harry Sircely / Courier Times

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