Last week marked the start of a new phase in the life of Flink Labs.

If I look back on the time since we started in May 2009, there have been 2 distinct phases, the first being from May until Oct during which time we got things set up, talked to potential clients, worked on our portfolio, got some great coverage, especially for the Ebb and Flow of Melbourne trains.

The second phase started in October when we presented Concept Lens, a Twitter visualisation, at Web Directions South. In some ways this was our coming out event. We had a small stand and a massive screen set up in the conference foyer and everyone had to walk past us to get to the talks. We got lots of leads out of the conference and from mid Oct until Christmas we have been engaged with a range of fantastic clients working on data visualisations, data mining and visualisation, conceptual user interfaces for visualisations and a couple of pure development projects. It was a real up-tick in the studio for the last quarter.

And now the third phase is beginning. After a good break, we have been back in the studio working with some amazing new clients with at least five solid projects in the pipeline, which if all came off would keep us exceptionally busy until the middle of the year. So this period is very much about execution and ensuring we can handle the traction we are getting in the marketplace.

In between and alongside these projects we are working on a few special interest pieces that are of relevance to us as a studio and also showcase some of the capabilities of data visualisation to a more mainstream audience.

One of these projects is our take on how data visualisation could be used in the recently released MySchool website that was launched by federal government a couple of weeks ago. Basically it is a reporting site for the all schools standardised testing results but unfortunately the site lacks a lot in terms of visualisations, comparative analysis and interactive self directed exploration. It’s very much a search and peck style service and we believe that it could be much much more. To that end we are working on visualisation of the data that we should have available in the coming 1-2 weeks.

We’re all very excited about the launch of the iPad and we’ve been thinking a lot about platforms/frameworks in which we want to focus moving forward. While we will continue to do work in Processing, we will be shifting our focus to the fantastic Protovis framework and starting to produce more work that runs natively in the browser be that on the desktop or on a mobile device.

So far, February has been fantastic and it looks like we’re going to have a great 2010 as our name gets known more in Australia and as our client list fills with fantastic companies.