I hadn't yet seen the talk by Hans Rosling, last year at Ted 2006. It's fascinating from a technology perspective but even more so from a political or social welfare perspective.

I browsed a little further into other Gapminder presentations, including one given by Ola Rosling at Google a year ago, where he talks about the significant differences made by left vs. right politics in achieving health advances vs. wealth advances -- a point which didn't appear in Hans' talk.

What is news is that Google bought the Trendanalyser software and hired its team from Gapminder, announced last month. The Gapminder foundation continues its mission separately although I'm not entirely clear what that is now.