Trendanalyzer : Check it out

20 Mar 2007

I’m sure most of you have heard by now of Google’s acquisition of Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software.

Gapminder is a Stockholm-based foundation so it looks like the Trendalyzer development team will be moving to Mountain View with the foundation itself remaining in Sweden.

I’d never actually heard of Trendalyzer until now. 

Over the past couple months, statistics and data visualization has become much more of a personal interest.  From a personal perspective, Tendalyzer is a pretty cool tool independent of the potential business value it brings to a company like Google.

Having spent 5 minutes on Google’s site, it looks promising.  It’s a given that they’ll be an integration with Google’s existing web analytics stuff but I’d love to see the basic trends in Google Reader improved as well.

Basically Trendalyzer provides a way of presenting data and statistics with simple time-lapse animation.  What’s available now is mostly population data plotable in various *X vs. Y *forms (w/ a 3^rd dimension being represented by color).  For example, you could plot ‘Physicians per 1000 people’ vs. ‘Life expectancy, years’ and follow the progression over the last few decades for any number of countries.  That’s just the beginning.

The ability to track multiple variables (countries and various other indicators) presented some interesting statistics.  I certainly didn’t know that the life expectancy of Malawi (randomly chosen country) residents decreased by almost 5 years between 1993 and 2003 w/ the # of physicians per 1000 people also dropping from 0.026 to 0.011.  Compare that with Canada’s constant 2.1 physicians per 1000 people (in 1993 and 2003) and life expectancy change of +1 years over the same time period.

Take India, since 1960 the life expectancy has increased from 44 years to 63 years.  There’s been a 3x increase in physicians per capital over the same time period… 0.21 -> 0.6…