Photo Credit: Bret Ancowitz, M.D.

Wednesday, March 23, 2008, 5:30 – 9pm
AS220
115 Empire Street, Providence, RI

Spring is in the air, and you know what that means – time to get your Geek on! (Alright, fine… according to us, it’s always that time.)

Chances are you’ve never heard of Rhode Island’s fastest growing private company as they tend to fly (and we do mean fly) under the local radar. According to Inc. Magazine, it’s North Kingston-based The Corporate Marketplace (TCMPI) with a recent annual growth rate of 1,858.3%. And get this – TCMPI was also ranked as the 73rd fastest growing company in the country.

Inc. explains that TCMPI, “builds private online stores for large corporations running employee incentive and reward programs… TCMPI’s software acts as a procurement hub, linking… reward buyers to factories at high-end brands.” In addition to the thousands of private stores, TCMPI also powers parts of Amazon.com and American Express’s huge Membership Rewards Program.

At this month’s Providence Geek Dinner, TCMPI CEO Chris Crawford and CTO Peter Mackey, will explain their incredible business, and give a rare demo of the online engine that makes it all possible.

Update: Chris has just authored a post about TCMPI for the RI Nexus weblog – The Little Engine that said it could.

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 florafox) 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 case you’re not already subscribed to our video podcast, we’ve posted a couple of video interviews from the last two geek dinners. My interview with Norm Olean of GyPSii is shown above, and you can find my interview with Andrew Schiller of Location Inc right here.