Wednesday, May 15, 5:30 – 8pm
AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
FREE (buy your own food and drink – it’s cheap)
RSVP at Facebook
For the May Geek Dinner, we may have the perfect Providence startup story!
When his 2-year-old son was diagnosed with diabetes, former jewelry industry executive Angelo Pitassi Jr. started learning about medical alert bracelets. He was unimpressed to say the least. In short order, Angelo partnered with technologist Christopher Melo, and HealthID was born.
Today the Jewelry District-based startup is poised at the intersection of the jewelry business and healthcare technology, and is accepting pre-orders for its first product — HealthID Profile (or “HIP”) Bands. HIP enables first responders to pull up critical, in-depth, current health information from NFC-based bands onto a web/mobile interface. The wearer can also manage all aspects of their personal health scenario while on the go.
On Wednesday, the Co-Founders CEO Angelo Pitassi Jr. and CTO Christopher Melo will tell the HealthID story, demonstrate their HIP product and give a sneak peek of where they’re headed next.
There are a lot of bicycle issues in Rhode Island including getting the shoulders of streets properly swept, providing more bike parking racks, finding funding to finish and connect various bike paths, identifying and signing appropriate bike routes, enforcing laws against dangerous driving, developing bike-share programs, and more generally creating a transportation culture that includes support and respect for bicycling. Progress is not easy on any of this.
Jane’s Walk is a two-day festival of free walking tours led by locals who want to talk about what matters to them in the places they live and work. Held on the first weekend of May (May 4 & 5), the festival celebrates the legacy of urban thinker Jane Jacobs by getting people out exploring their neighborhoods and meeting their neighbors. Last year, Jane’s Walk gathered nearly 20,000 people in 85 cities across the world.
In the John Carter Brown Library is a book, the margins of which are filled with a mysterious code, or shorthand, long believed to be the writing of Roger Williams, the seventeenth-century theologian and founder of Rhode Island. Although the shorthand went undeciphered for over three hundred years, in 2012, a team of Brown University undergraduate researchers, with the support of several faculty members, was able to crack the code. Contained within the shorthand was a previously untranslated essay written by Roger Williams late in his life, titled, “A Brief Reply to a Small Book Written by John Eliot,” which was part of an ongoing Protestant theological debate between those who believed the Bible supported the baptism of infants and those who were certain that adult baptism was the only biblically defensible practice.
The evening will feature Providence-based startup 
