Per Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed Gapminder post regarding Google's acquistion of Gapminder, I'm sure many can make their assumptions behind Google's strategy at picking up this interesting tool. You can also check out Alarm:Clock Euro's account of the Gapminder acquisition. As a geek when it comes to data imaging models, the "coolness" factor here is pretty "juicy". I can only imagine the multitude of datasets that could be nicely plugged into this little toy. As mentioned on the sourced posts, "too bad you can't enter your own data yet." The "play" and "trail" function are really nice. Nicely done. It will be interesting to see what Google's intentions are. Yes, we can all talk about the distribution of funds, moving money around, keeping stock prices afloat, acquisition of human resources, or making it look like "we are doing something", etc. I mean, come on, if you have a lot of cash, like Google does, you have to put those assets to work. Nonetheless, Google has picked up another good application. Check out Gapminder.org or try the Gapminder Beta and see what you can do.
Playing around with it, though, I thought it interesting to see the direction that Turkey's Women have gone. On this data set starting from 1980, I indicated Greece and Italy as European Union countries, and then threw Bulgaria in as an EU canditate at the time, and compared it with Turkey, itself an EU candidate and emerging market.
Looks disappointing, right? Well, population has something to do with it, but all things being equal, this should have been better. From 1980 to present, the percentage of women in the workforce went from 35% to just over 25%. Is this culture? Is it the (easy) cost of living? Is it the hidden economy? Why is it that more women are not working? The government, NGO's and banks have established promotion programs and funding incentives, but in a time when we should be monitoring innovation and pushing entrepreneurship, we find ourselves still concerned about general education and finding work. Perhaps we are just not there yet. Your thoughts?
 Technorati Tags: Google, Gapminder, "women entrepreneurs", entrepreneurship, Deal Flow, Turkey, innovation, "data analysis"Labels: acquisitions, Google, statistics, Turkey
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Publisher: Jon H. Black
