Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
.. targeted Google Ads! Hurrah! Oh, wait, I already use Opera to block them anyway... still, I guess this'll prove useful to actually putting ads up that vaguely interest people.
He wouldn't have made much money, anyway. Everyone knows that the real money is in providing a service for fourteen year old girls to shake their half naked asses in a camera for paedophiles to watch so they can target them with advertising for used schoolgirl panties and long-range cameras and binoculars from The Sharper Image catalog. Google will pay you a couple billion for that.
"Do no evil" is not the same as "always do good."