Abe Dane, COO of Tizra, presented at the December 2008 Providence Geek Dinner. In true holiday spirit, this was one of our more boisterous crowds, and Abe did an admirable job making the interview audible over the revelry. Video link

Photo Credit: Bret A. Ancowitz, M.D. of Garris Photography

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008, 5:30 – 9pm
AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
FREE (buy your own food and drink – it’s cheap)

Tis’ the Season. Join us next week for the last Geek Dinner of 2008. In addition to our usual fun, we’re going to have a canned food drive in support of the Rhode Island Food Community Bank. Please bring whatever you can – 1 can or 100. Learn more about our “Geeks for Good” canned food drive here.

I’m really looking forward to next week’s presentation. Almost 3 years ago now, when Providence-based start-up Tizra was only a few weeks old, they presented at one of the very first Geek Dinners. Next week they will be returning to show just how far they’ve come.

Tizra COO Abe Dane and other team members will give an overview and demo of Tizra Publisher – a web-based software service that lets content owners create branded commerce websites from existing content. Tizra Publisher is successfully serving a host of clients now including MIT Press.

Update: Abe has written a post at the RI Nexus blog – Scaling Everything but Cost: How Tizra went from Service to Software-as-a-Service.

Update: PBN just released an interview with Abe – Five Questions With: Abe Dane.

Please RSVP in the comments section of this post so that we can give the good folks at AS220 an estimated headcount. And while you’re at it, subscribe to Providence Geeks’ RSS feed (see sidebar) and/or join our very-low-volume email announcement list (for the announcement list, send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin over at Gmail with your name and affiliation).

As always, for first-timers here are the details on the Geek Dinners:

• The event itself is FREE! Beverages and food are for sale at the adjoining bar and Taqueria Pacifica (delicious and cheap)


• It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and take off whenever! And don’t worry about eating or not – come famished or full – eating is optional, and frankly, the least of the festivities (that’s not say the food isn’t good – it’s actually great)


• 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, innovative business models, interaction design, social computing, digital art, web services, etc. etc. etc.


• There is Wi-Fi so bring your connected device of choice.

In the spirit of the season, we’re joining our collective Geeky forces to help out the local community. At next week’s Providence Geeks meeting (Wednesday 12/17 5:30pm-9pm at AS220), in addition to the usual beer, tech and mirth, we’ll be collecting non-perishable food items for the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. Please feel free to bring 1 can or 100 – we’ll be set up to receive as much as you can give!

Here’s a list RI Food Bank of what’s most needed: