Photo Credit: Bret Ancowitz, M.D.

Wednesday, May 15, 2008, 5:30 – 9pm
AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI

FREE (buy your own food and drink – it’s cheap)

Next week’s Geek Dinner will feature a presentation by the Founder and CTO of The Search Agency and Providence Geek regular, Carl Dunham. Carl and team are enjoying a great spring having just announced a major investment by JMI Equity (JMI knows something about picking winners in the online advertising space, having invested in a few including a little outfit called DoubleClick). From the press release:

[The Search Agency] provides SEM and SEO to online advertisers through a suite of paid search and organic search tools, including its AdMax platform. The company’s unique approach to online marketing is based on combining proprietary technology with a robust service offering, and has resulted in annual growth rates exceeding 100% and market leading client retention rates.

Update: Carl has just authored a post for the RI Nexus weblog – The Search Agency: A Cross-Country Odyssey.

Update: We’ve got a bonus treat at this month’s Geek Dinner. Local RepRap hacker Bruce Wattendorf will be setting up his RepStrap at AS220 just before (between 4:30 and 5:00) the Geek Dinner begins. Come early to check it out and get a taste of the future of personal fabrication!

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:

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• The event itself is FREE! Beverages and food are for sale at the adjoining bar and Taqueria Pacifica (delicious and cheap)
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• 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)
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• 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.
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• There is Wi-Fi so bring your connected device of choice.
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Here’s the interview from the last Providence Geek dinner. I speak with Peter Mackey, CTO of TCMPI, who presented at the last geek dinner. He talks about what his company does, how they built things on .NET really quickly, and their data centers in RI and Colorado! Video link.