Google starts bubble-blowing

Statistics can seem numbing -- column after column of grey, boring numbers. But statistics can also be represented through animations, such as colorful bubbles dancing over your screen.

Last year, Google aquired the statistics animation program, Trendalyzer, from the Swedish Gapminder Foundation. Now the basic functions are available as small software gadget, that lets you put color and motion to your own datasets.

Trendalyzer started as the brainchild of Hans Rosling, professor in international health at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. He searched for a way to tell his students that the “world was getting better;" that differences in standard of living, life expectancy at birth, child mortality and so on were diminishing. His son Ola Rosling and Ola’s wife Anna Rosling-Ronnlund developed the animation software.

At the TED conferences in 2006 and 2007 Hans Rosling got a lot of attention for his lectures on world development, in which he used Trendalyser to illustrate the message. (He also got some extra attention for swallowing a sword-- or to be precise, a 19th century Swedish army rifle bayonet -- on stage.)

The development of Trendalyzer was organized by the Gapminder Foundation and financed with grants mainly from the Swedish International Development Agency. Last spring, Google acquired Trendalayzer from Gapminder; the company also retained the services of Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling-Rönnlund.

The two Swedes have since worked on a new version of Trendalayzer that can be used to visualize and animate all sorts of datasets, from stockmarket statistics to population demographics. Last week Google released the group's first product, a small gadget that can be used together with the Google.doc spreadsheet.

“It is very basic," says Ms. Rosling-Rönnlund. "But you get bubbles and color, you get motion and you can use your own data."