The Digital Cloud

Google labs released something called Fusion Tables in June which allows people to import and visualise structured data in various ways.  If this data is public data then the resulting visualisations can be shared as a widget which can be embedded in any website as you would do with video.  (see below) 

Fusion tables are also interesting for their approach to creating online public collaborative databases.  With Fusion tables you can merge data with other tables, open and secure parts of your tables and collaborate on data down to the cell level. An interesting potential approach for a lot organisations especially charities or government bodies. Almost a wikki for structured data.  

Google have also recently added an API to allowing one to update and query your dataset in Fusion Tables programmatically.

Below is an example of a animated visualisation of historical production data for a few countries (from the BP statistical review) which I created in about 5 minutes.  Play around with it and I would be interested to hear anyone's thoughts on how visualisations such as this would be applicable to their industry.

Warning! do not select a country and trails when running the animation - this seems to be too much for my browser