Google Snaps Up Stats Tool from Swedish Charity

paulraps writes "A stats program that began as a teaching aid for a university lecture has just been bought by Google for an undisclosed sum. The statistics tool, Trendalyzer, was developed by a professor and his son at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute. Unfortunately for the developers, the project has been run under the auspices of a charity, Gapminder, and financed over the last seven years by public money. Maybe that seemed smart at the time, but the professor, admitting that he won't see a dime of Google's cash, now seems regretful. As for what Google has purchased: 'Public organizations around the world invest 20 billion dollars a year producing different kinds of statistics. Until now, nobody has thought of collecting all the information in the same place. That should be possible with Trendalyzer, which will be able to present that quantity of data in a clear way as well as giving the user the ability to compare many different kinds of information.'"

Comments

Re:If this was developed with public money...

[Anonymous Coward]

why am I not able to walk into a public library and read your driver's license, birth records, marriage records, medical history, criminal records, and so forth?

Lack of 1337 skillz, of course.

Re:What does it do?

[ozbird]

The animated mapping of stats at http://tools.google.com/gapminder is a little more illustrative.

So now it's lies, damn lies, and Pacman on acid?

2400 baud, and I feel fine.

[Short Circuit]

Ah...so you remember when the Internet was an educational and military tool, back before it took off?

Back before Google, or even Yahoo. Back when a T1 cost $1500/mo or more, making entry in to the ISP business difficult. Back before multimedia content (shareware games) pushed your average home user's bandwidth above 2400 baud.

Yeah, commercialization of the Internet really destroyed its value.

Re:So we can look forward to more accurately..

[bitt3n]

I offer a service and have for almost a decade now and I've spent about $30k on it.

$30K? ouch. I was spending that kind of money on my web service also, until I managed to negotiate a volume discount with the escort service I use. I even had enough money left over to buy a much better webcam, and a professional-grade fireman costume.