Last week, Providence Geek Owen Johnson’s web startup, Investment Instruments, launched Rentometer, a mashup for comparing your rent to those of similar nearby apartments. As the following links attest the webosphere is loving it:

• LifeHacker


• Digg

Investment Instruments’ flagship site, iiProperty, provides rental property owners with an impressive line-up of web-based property management tools. And yes, Owen will be presenting the larger iiProperty offering at an upcoming Geek Dinner.

I’ve been liveblogging the sessions at this week’s BIF-2 Summit. You can see my running notes and photos in the bif-2 category at Jepstone.net.

Photo Credit: Bret A. Ancowitz, M.D. of Garris Photography
Wednesday, October 11, 2006, 5:30pm – 9:30pm+
Brown University’s CIT (Directions)
Providence, RI

October’s Geek Dinner will be the first one that we take on the road. Brown’s Computer Science Department and the Brown Forum for Enterprise have graciously volunteered to host us at Brown’s CIT. (And no, we are not abandoning AS220 as our unofficial clubhouse.)

Brown CS Professor and Providence Geek, Shriram Krishnamurthi, and his team of researchers will be unveiling for the first time publicly their reactive programming language for the web—Flapjax. You do not want to miss this.

Since we’re at the CIT, the food situation is going to be a little different this time. We suggest you walk over to nearby Thayer St., grab some food, and bring it to the CIT. Here are just some of the many take-out options there:

• Johnny Rockets


• Spike’s


• Kabob ‘n Curry


• Au Bon Pain

[Update: Shriram has posted a mash-up of nearby eateries here]

Geek Dinners are totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and vamoose whenever… Topics of conversation will vary as they will at any gathering of geeks, but many of us will be talking about AJAX, mash-ups, start-ups, new devices, business models, interaction design, social computing, digital art, and web services.

Please RSVP using the comments on this blog entry so we can give the good folks at Brown an estimated headcount. And while you’re at it, subscribe to Providence Geeks’ feeds and/or join our very-low-volume email announcement list (for the announcement list, send an email to Jack Templin at jtemplin at Gmail with your name and affiliation).

The next Providence Geeks Dinner on Wednesday, October 11th at Brown’s CIT will feature the first public demonstration of Flapjax, a new programming language for building contemporary Web applications developed by a team Brown CS researchers.

The presentation will be by the core Flapjax team: Leo Meyerovich, Michael Greenberg, Gregory Cooper, Aleks Bromfield, and Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi.

Flapjax has five essential features:

1. It is an event-driven, reactive language, ideal for writing browser-based client applications.


2. It provides a reactive, persistent store that automatically updates on all clients sharing the same data.


3. It enables convenient sharing of data with other users.


4. It implements access-control to channel this sharing.


5. It provides libraries to connect to external Web services (thereby enabling client-side mash-ups).

Flapjax is built entirely atop (and is syntactically identical to) JavaScript, and can thus run on traditional Web browsers without the the need for plug-ins or other downloads.