Life & Research Notes

Taco Lab is a design and prototyping firm that I am co-founding with my friend and fellow Media Lab grad Jeevan Kalanithi. Our clients so far have included Hallmark, Panasonic, HandsOnToys, and Qixen-P. This week we’re settling into some studio space with our friends at Electric Works, and soon we’ll have a real portfolio up online, plus maybe even an occasional Taco fanclub newsletter.

I’m also happy to watch Swivel continue to make real progress after I change my relationship with them. With Swivel Business now in a public beta with real customers, plus a strategic redesign of certain key interactions in the works, Swivel’s future looks really bright. Plus the transition is happening on good terms for everyone, so I know we’ll all stay in touch and probably even continue working together.

Thanks to all you friends who bother to read this and who have supported me in this big change! You have an open invitation to come design, code, build, and dork around with Jeevan and me in our new TL office v1beta (which I promise will be way better than alpha), coming very soon.

While I’d like to be reporting lofty revelations about transformational design and social data analysis, those topics seem like a lot to tackle at this point, especially since I’m sitting on the floor and low on batteries. So I’ll just summarize my situation: Florence is beautiful, the workshop yesterday was excellent, and dinner at Buca Mario last night was delicious (few things can beat a fantastically giant 30 euro aged T-bone steak, except perhaps those succulent shavings of lard). Subsequent guinnesses at the nearby Irish bar (staffed by legitimate Irish expat bartenders) didn’t hurt either.

Not sure of my exact plan yet, but I have four days here at CHI, and pretty much every day has at least a few presentations I want to see. I’ve already run into a couple crews of people I know from Stanford, MIT, and the visualization community. It’s great to see familiar faces here, and to be meeting and interacting with all these creative, curious people.

After CHI I’ll take a week to cruise around Italy, most likely hitting Rome and Venice. For a number of reasons, when traveling alone I tend to want to stick to cities. Looking forward to sitting on park benches in piazzas, drinking beer, eating paninis, feeding the pigeons, and scoping out the locals and tourists as they wander past.

I love this admin interface for the 37signals unified billing and monitoring system, Queen Bee.

When Huned saw it his reaction was, “oh, it’s like top for your business,” which is a great description. This concept of live business data streams is a big part of the new Swivel business product we’re taking into beta shortly. We’re excited to bring these paradigms to a wider audience of people and teams who don’t have the resources to roll their own solutions.