Hans Rosling has announced that he has sold his Trendalyzer software -- which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats -- to Google...

WoW.... now this will be absolutely amazing... move over IBM's Many Eyes... a real visualization tool is about to hit the mainstream....

For those not familiar with Hans and his work, there are a link to his latest work (video from TED 2007) and an embedded video (from TED 2006) in the Tangler TED Discussion group @ Hans Rosling demonstrates trends

Now Try the Demo !

There's a demo here

If you change the settings to measure income per capita vs internet users per 1000 people - you can literally watch as the internet explosion takes place.

Now select China and the US ... and replay the scenario... you can see that adoption (in terms of users per 1000 people) in China 1n 2004 is approximately the same rate that the US had in 1995....

With all the UN's database being made public you'll be seeing more and more of the use of Moving Statistical Displays...

wow, simply amazing...

Yes, this is really cool. Gives me the same feeling of excitement as when I saw Google Earth for the first time... We'll soon have for visualising development data the same kind of improvement that Google Earth brought us for geography.