Lawrence, the African Uptimist, points us in the direction of a tool called Gapminder. He has a good quick summary of what the tool is and how it works.

…the Gapminder puts development indicators at your fingertips, and enables you to visualize them using a dynamic scatterplotting system where each bubble represents a country…

Make sure you take the time to try the tool out. It has so many scales and variables that you can sort the data by, that you should never run out of fun or interesting combinations. One of my favorite things to do is create an data sort, and then use the “video” option at the bottom to watch how the countries in question have faired over time.

The graph I ran above (as a video) plotted the economic growth of Chad from 1976-2004 alongside the growth of internet users per 1000 people in that country.

Gapminder could be (is) a pretty powerful tool to study economic growth.

Nicholas over at Billionaire Businessman has some really exciting news. He’s about to release a public version of a project called Cheeseforge – a slimmed down and manageable finance program.

Think of it as an easier, lighter, friendlier, simpler version of Quickbooks that you use within your browser (think Gmail for finances).

He’s offering a 3-tier pricing structure:

• A free account for 1-5 users
• A small company level for 6-20 users that has a powerful analytics function and better user management
• A premium service for enterprise-level use allowing an unlimited number of users that has better security, branded subdomain, and more user-options

It’s great to see new web applications coming out of Africa. I’m really looking forward to testing it and will do a review once I’ve played around with it a little bit. I’m a big fan of the pricing structure, and I’m set to be impressed by the actual application as well.

Head on over to http://my.cheeseforge.com to sign up for more news and to get on the list to try it out.

Many of you either know about, or have read, the paper I wrote called A Web Technology Idea for Africa back in March. Since that time, I’ve been working with Thakadu of Muti and News Map fame to develop the news portion of that idea – it drives our focus.

In summary, we believe that the web can truly impact Africans in a profound way. The trick is to make the social power of the web available to them through both the internet and mobile phones. Mobile phones being the most common technological platform that Africans have access to since the mobile explosion on the continent started in the mid-1990s.

Zangu is the platform that we are creating to make that vision into a reality. Our first phase is “news”, which will be followed by “community” and “search”. Our goal with the prototype of Zangu News is to bring both traditional and user-generated news (ie: blogs), to the masses in an organized way. Our first step is to make it available on the web, then integrate that with the mobile component.

We’ve got some great ideas that we’re testing now to make sure that the news is fresh and relevant each time you visit. Both Thakadu and I (Erik Hersman) are very excited about where the application is going, and can’t wait for it to be ready to actually test.

At this moment we are allowing people to sign up to be Beta testers of Zangu News. This early sign up group will be notified of when the Beta testing will begin and will be an integral part of making it work. We also look for feedback on making this application uniquely African, and know that the feedback from the African digerati will be very important.

Wow, I’m extremely impressed! Thakadu, a frequent visitor here and friend, has come out with a nice Google Maps and Yahoo News mashup that he’s simply calling News Map. Basically, he’s broken down the the finding of current news stories by country into the easiest common denominator – geography.

It’s actually much more than African news being mapped, it’s international. However, since it was created by someone within the African digerati circle, I took creative license in the title to this post.

Thakadu is also the creator of Muti, an African news aggregator. It takes submissions from registered users (much like Reddit and Digg), and stories go up or down depending upon how much they are read and voted on.

I thought I might have a little fun with Google’s new Google Trends tool. Basically, it allows you to search for any term, or combination of terms and see what the search and news volume is on it. It could actually be a pretty interesting marketing tool if it gave out some more information.

My test was using the terms, “Kenya, Sudan, Tanzania, Somalia, Uganda”.

As you can see from the results, Kenya is much more consistently on people’s minds than any other country. Also note, there was a big spike in interest on Sudan in early 2005 (Darfur?).

However, notice that the lower graph shows that Sudan is the country in the news more than any other.