Wednesday, July 25, 2007, 5:30pm – 9pm
AS220
115 Empire Street, Providence, RI

This is your last chance to get your geek on before September. Yup, we take August off. Even geeks need to “shut down” sometimes… did I really just type that?

We’ve got another great presenter lined up – Providence-based startup, Digication. Digication provides an easy way for schools to create online communities and for teachers and students to showcase their work. Digication is founded by faculty at RISD’s Art + Design Education Department. Digication was made available to US schools in August 2006, within 10 months, it has attracted users from over 1000 schools in all 50 states in the US.

Digication has been featured in numerous publications and outlets including Forbes and The Christian Science Monitor. And last Fall, Digication Founder, Jeff Yan was interviewed Leo Laporte for a TWIT podcast.

On Wednesday, Jeff and Jeffrey Tagen, one of Digication’s software developers will share some of the lessons learned, including business strategies, technology scalability, choice of software library/ framework / platform.

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

• 
  
• It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and vamoose 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.
• 
  
• Food and beverages are for sale at the adjoining Taqueria Pacifica and bar.
• 
  
• There is WiFi so bring your connected device of choice.
• 
  

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

Wednesday, May 23, 2007, 5:30pm – 9pm+
AS220
115 Empire Street, Providence, RI

At next week’s Geek Dinner, find out how a local entrepreneur assembled a team of 4 ex-Amazonians in the “Biggest Little” to launch a new Ruby on Rails customizable contact organizer for micro-businesses (you know, the tech startup, the freelance consultant, the local florist or bakery…).

Pamela O’Hara, President of Barrington-based BatchBlue Software, and Sean Ransom, VP of Technology and former Amazonian, will talk about how the team got together and used their well-honed usability intelligence to create a database for the masses called BatchBook.

Get a sneak peek of the app as they prepare to go to beta. They’ll
be taking questions and answers after the presentation.

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:

• 
  
• It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and vamoose 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.
• 
  
• Food and beverages are for sale at the adjoining Taqueria Pacifica and bar.
• 
  
• There is WiFi so bring your connected device of choice.
• Update Brian will give a brief report from his visit to last weekend’s Maker Faire.
  

Providence Geek and Investment Instruments President Owen Johnson will be showing off his startup’s wares at tomorrow’s Geek Dinner.

Creator of systems and services for the real estate industry, Investment
Instruments first two systems are iiProperty, an online property
management solution, and the Rentometer, a comparative market analysis site for rentals. Owen will give a quick overview of his company and the changes afoot in the real estate industry, and then walkthrough
highlights of each system. Both systems are built using Ruby on Rails
and MySQL.

The Providence-Based American Mathematical Society just published an article detailing Google’s PageRank algorithm, How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web’s Haystack.

[Via Infoworld: Google’s Search Secret Revealed]

We use SpamKarma 2 to keep this site relatively clean of comment spam. I was clearing out the filter a few days ago and found a message with an astoundingly low karma of -3690.56. The usual value is in the low (high) double digits, and I’ve seen a few in the high (low) triple digits. But this is some sort of new evolutionary low. Just thought you’d like to know.