Ossama Hamed writes in with a new dynamic graphing software:
I have the pleasure to brief you on our Data Visualization software “Trend Compass”.
TC is a new concept in viewing statistics and trends in an animated way by displaying in one chart 5 axis (X, Y, Time, Bubble size & Bubble color) instead of just the traditional X and Y axis. . . .
You can add an animated chart to any Google Spreadsheet with the same 5-axis display. See this chart of college basketball expenditures and wins as an example. Though not nearly as professional as Trend Compass, it's completely free.
Gapminder clone? http://www.gapminder.org/
It looks pretty much like a Gapminder clone… not new at all…
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_b…
He's been spamming with that email for the past couple of years.
I keep getting emails from them, too. It's an implementation of the gapminder/trendalyzer idea, but even busier than that one. They're also not very good at demoing: when you pick two indicators for the x and y axes and hit play, you see that the data is completely random. You can't see anything in this mess.
It's not a bad implementation, but the idea isn't exactly new, and it's nowhere near as "epic" as their name might imply.
If you want to see a good demo and a nice implementation of the idea, check out the OECD Factbook eXplorer instead.
Hi all. Thanks for the comments. I was hoping that someone who knew more than I did would supply some useful context.
It's easy to say that this is a "Gapminder clone" or something you can already do in Google Documents*, but there's a difference: it's a commercial application, and it apparently does things that Google Docs can't…among them, it allows company data to stay inside the firewall, it doesn't require you to pop open Google during a presentation, and it looks more flexible. All that said, I found this page while trying to locate actual reviews of their product, or perhaps ways of exporting the Google gadget to PowerPoint, and so far no luck. There's also a workaround for creating motion charts in Excel, but the animation is jerky if you don't do a lot of interpolated points.
Meh. Someone will find a way to integrate this as an add-in to Excel, sooner or later.
*where it's already a clone, since Google bought the software from Gapminder