Data visualization at its best – A Gapminder presentation at a TED conference

It is interesting that one may be very close geographically to important events/activities but be quite oblivious of them. Such was the case with me.

The event that in question is a TED conference in Monterey, California. I very recently came across TED, long after I left the Monterey area. TED started out  as a conference that brings together people from the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design, but has grown beyond that to bring great thinkers and doers from these and other fields.

The presentation  in question is by Hans Rosling, a founder of Gapminder which is a Swedish non-profit organization which develops and distributes free software to visualize human development.

The presentation is located on TED and I would urge everybody to take a look at it. It breaks commonly held myths and stereotypes about the developing world and how it relates to the developed world economically and health wise.  Through a captivating presentation of statistical data in an animated fashion, Hans Rosling shows how Asian countries have really progressed in health and wealth over the last few decades.

The presentation is made using the Trendalyzer software developed by the Gapminder foundation that uses lively animation to depict complex global trends in anthropology and global economics. This makes the presentation really come ‘alive’ in a fashion I have not  seen before in any other statistical presentations till date.

You can play hands on with the Gapminder tools to understand the power of the software. The Trendalyzer software used to create these tools was recently acquired by Google who no doubt saw its value and my prediction is that we will see it as one of the Google Apps shortly.

Till then, if somebody can get their hands on a Beta copy of the software, I would be interested in trying it out (Drop me a line if you do have it!)