Remember KeyHole and how Google transformed it in Google Earth ? And Sketchup that it also acquired and released it for free for people to make 3D objects to be plugged into Google Earth or simply as standalone objects ? Their latest disruptive move (see the article by Paidcontent) is named Trendalyzer from the non-profit GapMinder. This is a powerful tool for easy creating and rendering of animated graphics, the kind to reconcile a student with statistics and to allow even the most stubborn manager to see the evidence in a trend drawn from thousands of numbers and tables. The tool is available there : http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

Trendalyzer was shown by Hans Rosling, a Swedish teacher at the TED 2006 conference : I can not urge your more to have a look at the video, it is brilliant !!! I wish I had a teacher like him … with such tools we will probably get more students that go for scientific education Not speaking about BI (Business Intelligence) softwares for corporations … As he said : his goal is to liberate all the data from the publicly funded databases and make it searchable to then display it … guess what : his dream will probably come true rather sooner If Google goes the same way than with Google Book, negociating deals library after library, content owner after content owner, it may soon be possible to access in a nice and powerful way data about just anything (if there is enough potential for monetizing this content through advertising or else …). Just think about the possibilities of analysis, of better decision making, of better understanding … Just link this with approaches like Pipes from Yahoo! and you will get very powerful mashups from innovative minds all around the world… Once again the power of visual information …