David Notik

I recently read (in the Economist, my hands-down favorite magazine publication) this great profile of Hans Rosling, the man behind superb data visualizations about our rapidly changing world via his company Gapminder, which Google acquired back in 2007 and made more broadly available as Google Public Data Explorer.

Read the article, but also check this video with gives you a taste of Roslin's passion for opening up this data and making it truly accessible, and more importantly for what it teaches us about our world -- a rapidly changing, converging world in which the dynamics today are radically different than they were not too long ago. I love this kind of stuff, because it enables us to better understand our world, our future, and it empowers us to make a difference, identify opportunities, effectuate change and progress and it ultimately makes the world a smaller place by making us aware.