At the July 2010 Providence Geek Dinner, co-founders Andrew Draper and Ken Johnson told the story of Manpacks. I caught up with them after their presentation. [Video link]

At the May 2010 Providence Geek Dinner, Swipely CEO Angus Davis demoed their service to the public and opened the beta to a room full of new users. I caught up with Angus after the Geek Dinner to learn more. [Video link]

Photo Credit: Chris Meringolo

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010, 5:30 – 8:30pm
AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
FREE (buy your own food and drink – it’s cheap)

Providence-based NABsys is on a serious roll. The startup’s latest achievements include closing a $7 million Series B round and naming semiconductor legend and Analog Devices co-founder Ray Stata to its board.

While frequently described as a bio-tech company, NABsys is much more. As they explain:

Nabsys is a life sciences company working at the intersection of physics, biology, and computer science to revolutionize medicine through clinical-grade whole-geonome DNA sequencing. NABsys is one of five companies to receive a ”$1000 Genome” award from the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

At the April Geek Dinner, Nabsys President & CEO and Providence-native Barret Bready will give an overview of NABsys focusing on the impressive computer science and information technology that is enabling his company to make major breakthroughs in DNA sequencing.

Please RSVP at Facebook – and while you’re there please join our Facebook group. And if you want to join our very-low-volume email announcement send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin@gmail.com 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 AS220’s bar and new restaurant.


• 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.

Photo Credit: Mr. Ducke

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010, 5:30 – 8:30pm
AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
FREE (buy your own food and drink – it’s cheap)
Transportation and Parking Tips

The March Geek Dinner is a particularly big one for me.

Wednesday evening, my brother Chris and I are going to be giving the first public preview of Lockify. We have developed a new web-based method for safely sharing sensitive information over the Internet.

Lockifying sensitive information before sharing it online protects you and your contacts. Doing so helps guard against interception, copying, archiving, security breaches, data-mining and other rotten stuff.

We’re pretty excited about Lockify, and even more excited to share it with the local geek community, which as always, has been super supportive. We hope you’ll join us.

Please RSVP at Facebook (In the interest of making it more “viral”, we’re doing our RSVPs on Facebook – and while you’re there please join our Facebook group. And if you want to join our very-low-volume email announcement send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin@gmail.com 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 AS220’s bar and new restaurant.


• 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.

At the last Providence Geek Dinner of 2009, DiJiPOP CEO Ji Kim, an online advertising veteran, and Bill Cesare, a highly successful and prolific entrepreneur/investor, gave an overview of their dynamic company. We caught up with Ji after the Geek Dinner to learn more. [Video link]