Wonder if this came out of their acquisition of Gapminder's Trendalyzer software. The one also featured in the Ted videos with Hans Rosling [1]. They seem to at least have integrated it under "Visualize > Motion", but it isn't working for me right now.
Google has a difficult task ahead of them as Avi Bryant & co have been working on DabbleDB, which seems quite similar to this, for a couple years now. www.dabbledb.com
There's also Swivel (swivel.com), Verifiable (verifiable.com) and as mentioned earlier IBM's Many Eyes. You've always got the glowering presence of the Business Intelligence giants (SAP/Business Objects in particular) too...
And our startup (timetric.com) too, I guess, though looking at this our emphasis is very different to theirs: we do time series exclusively, which means we have a completely different set of strengths and weaknesses.
Interestinly enough, though maybe not suprisingly, some of the early adopters have been newspapers. IBM are working with the New York Times; we're UK based and have been working with the Guardian...
wow.. this is really cool..
so unlike wolfram alpha, which is painstakingly gathering data from different sources themselves, google might be using this to let users give them the data (assuming they choose to make it public)
