It’s been a busy April for CF Labs. Our first month proper (i.e. with a full-strength team) has been all about getting our working environment set up, meeting people to get the message out and ideas in, and also embarking on our first development project. For this we’re producing a relatively straightforward proof-of-concept website which demonstrates our aim of taking data with
a consumer relevance and making it as accessible as possible. Work on this project is nearing completion, and we will be launching in the next few weeks.

With regards to the technologies we’re using, the site is coded in PHP with a MySQL backend and we’re using Eclipse as our development environment along with the excellent CodeIgniter framework. Richard has talked about some of the other technologies we are using in a previous post.

Meanwhile we’ve been doing our best to get out and generally spread the word. We recently met with Richard Stirling of the Cabinet Office who is involved with the government’s Power of Information review to discuss possible ways of working together. Likewise with representatives of the TrustMark scheme. We’ve also been throwing our cards around at SXSW, Trydan Social Media Cafe in Cardiff, Ignite Cardiff & Future of Web Design 2009 to name a few. Richard gave a presentation to Consumer Focus staff earlier this month explaning the role of CF Labs along with its possibilities – hopefully there’s a few less confused people within the organisation now.

As ever, we’re appealing for your ideas. We’ve had some fantastic stuff in already & we just want more. We’ll be knocking our heads together later in the month to go through everything we’ve received and will be choosing several to develop. Big thanks to everyone who’s contributed so far.

And finally… we’ve redesigned this site to make it more attractive & easier to use. We hope you agree with us!