32 countries qualified to the Football World Cup in South Africa. In Gapminder World Cup you can see how they score on some football- as well as development indicators.

• Is the World Cup mostly for rich countries?
• Are rich countries generally more successful than poorer countries?
• Are populous countries better than smaller countries?

Statistics isn’t everything
Brazil is the highest ranked team in the world according to FIFA:s ranking. They have 26 times as many registered football players in the country as North Korea, the lowest ranked team in the World Cup. In spite of that, North Korea managed to score a goal and Brazil only won by 2-1. See this in Gapminder World Cup.

Who will qualify to the second round?
Europe got a bit of a bad start while the Americas were quite successful. Halfway through the qualifying round, the map looks like this:

Blue countries are first or second place in the group (in the qualifying position) and red means no qualification halfway into the qualifying leg. Follow the development here.

On 24 April 2010, professor Angus Maddison passed away at the age of 83. Maddison was an economist and economic historian and a pioneer in exploring the broad developments of the world through statistics.

His data has been a foundation for the work of Gapminder in several areas. In our work to construct longer time series for indicators such as GDP and income data for all countries of the world, Maddison’s groundbreaking work has been completely invaluable.

He will be missed.

Yesterday (April 20, 2010) the World Bank reveiled that it will offer free access to a huge amount of development statistics. This bold and longly awaited step to liberate the data gives students, researchers, designers, journalists and organizations access to important statistics.

At the same time the World Bank launches a brand new web site: data.worldbank.org that will make it easier to find and use the statistics you want.

World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick presented the new policy in a video where he also announced that the World Bank soon will launch an “apps for development competition”, challenging the developers community to develop the best tools for better understanding of development statistics.

Free access to public data is something that Hans Rosling, director of Gapminder, has been advocating for years. The World Bank’s webpage quotes him saying: “It’s the right thing to do, because it will foster innovation. That is the most important thing.”

• Go the the new data.worldbank.org
• Read the World Banks news post (including video)

About this video:
An interview with Hans Rosling for Ericsson’s “2020 Shaping Ideas” project. In the project, 20 global thinkers are asked to share their view of the drivers and trends for the future. This is Hans Rosling’s thoughts.

Read more about 2020 Shaping Ideas

As you can see, Gapminder’s web site has got a facelift, but also some helpful new features. Here are the most important new features that will help you explore the world with Gapminder.

New and improved Gapminder World
Most new features can be found in Gapminder World, the on-line graph that displays the development for for over 200 countries and territories for a large number of indicators.

We have made it much easier to find interesting stories in the vast amount of data. Simply click the “Open graphs menu” button to browse through the list of stories that we found interesting and together with the graph get a short explanation of what the graph is showing.

The list of stories will grow over time and please, feel free to suggest new graphs or comparisons from the data, that you think should be in that list.

You can of course still make your own graph by choosing yourself among the 430 indicators and share that graph with the world, as before.

We also made it a lot easier to share your graph through your blog, web page or e-mail as well as finding the documentation to the statistics we use in Gapminder World.

New Data page makes download of statistics easy
The new Data page lists all the indicators, allowing you to search and download data to excel by just a click of a button. You also have the option to simply view it online or see it in a Gapminder graph.

The data page also contains information about the countries and territories you can see in Gapminder  World and full documentation for the time series that have been compiled by Gapminder, from various sources.

Especially for teachers
To assist teachers and educators in using Gapminder in their education, we have opened a new For Teachers page especially for this group. During the spring we will add tools, resources and examples that we think could be useful in education.