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.

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.

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.

Thanks Visnu.

Also, frankly, I was surprised and dismayed to find out that the topic of putting “sophisticated visualization techniques in the hands of lay users” was even a controversial one. While the overwhelming sentiment in the room was pro-democratization, there was some tense internal community introspection happening there that, in all honesty, made me relieved to be an outsider. While this sort of question may seem interesting as a hypothetical, it is a non-issue when you are actually hammering out a product in a competitive market. Or, rather, the question changes to an imperative: design for simplicity while maintaining expressivity. Low floors, high ceilings, etc.

Tomorrow afternoon Sara and I are heading to Sacramento for the InfoVis conference, where I’m participating in a panel on The Impact of Social Data Visualization alongside Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda Viega, and Ola Rosling. I’ll be representing Swivel, in particular our market driven approach to data sharing, collaboration and visualization, and emerging topics of data ownership and provenance, privacy, and so on.

This Monday I’ll join up full-time with Swivel, a social data aggregation, analysis and publishing platform. They are a startup in downtown SF, and I’ll be acting in a dual role as both designer and engineer, collaborating with some very talented developers to push the app to the next phase.

I actually learned about these guys quite a while back, as data aggregation and visualization was an area of interest for me when I applied to the lab, and when they got their first round of press I definitely noticed them. It’ll be fun to pick back up on this trail, well armed with my PLW and ML experiences. Eventually Swivel aims to act as an open bazaar of data, not only of static sets as it is now, but also live, dynamic feeds via the upcoming API. On top of the core services, they are also working on publishing tools for people to weave the data into consumable narratives.

No doubt the web industry is hot again, and I’ve seen a lot of interesting opportunities. Yet since I first contacted them, Swivel has solidly stood out from the crowd with an original and powerful underlying idea, combined with a fun, fast, smart, hard-working, and cohesive team. Needless to say I’m excited to dive in to the tasty data goodness.

Update: Swivel is also in the news today with pieces on TechCrunch and O’Reilly Radar about their recent success at the OECD World Forum.