Photo credit: Chris Meringolo

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010, 5:30 – 8:30pm
AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
FREE (buy your own food and drink – it’s cheap)

If you haven’t already seen today’s national tech news, Providence-based startup Swipely has just announced a limited beta launch of their highly-anticipated “social shopping” service. Better still, they also announced a $7.5 million Series A round, led by some of the tech world’s savviest investors.

Swipely CEO and Providence-native Angus Davis was not only the youngest employee at Netscape during its halycon days, but also a co-founder of interactive voice-leader TellMe, which Microsoft acquired a couple of years ago to the tune of close to $1 billion. Takeaway = Swipely is one to watch.

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: 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.

Ever wonder where we find the photos for the Providence Geek Dinner announcements? So do we sometimes. And that’s where you come in. Do you have a great picture of Providence that we can use for an announcement? If so, please add it to this Flickr group! All we ask is that you use the Creative Commons Attribution or Creative Commons Attribution+Share Alike license, which makes it easier for us to remix it into an announcement picture.

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.

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 February 2010 Providence Geek Dinner, Custom Flow Solution CEO Hanaan Rosenthal gave us a look at their system for generating the graphs that adorn the pages of papers such as the New York Times and the Boston Globe. I caught up with Hanaan after the Geek Dinner to learn more. [Video link]