It's indeed not perfect on this front. Furthermore, real statistician pointed that a continuous line for the pyramid was not the good choice, but I was looking more for interesting visuals and ways to spark the interest of people. That's why I used these animations, it gives the feeling to people to see what's happening.
Unfortunately, the way I animate this graph is very basic and I did not take time to make it perfect (the data crunching, SEO optimization and UI fine tunings already took way more time than I wanted to put in this). This is just a hobby project for me.
The projections past 2010 are interesting too but they tend to smooth the curves which is probably not very realistic, as seen from the past. Nevertheless, it's interesting to see that the population of some countries has already started to shrink, like Russian Federation: http://populationpyramid.net/Russian+Federation/2010/
Regarding Afghanistan—there're many other “young” countries, f.ex. check Burundi, Venezuela, Madagascar. To be fair, the graph by itself doesn't tell whether the reason is high mortality rate or people expatriating, but admittedly the former is more likely…
I'm from Venezuela. I guess this doesn't affect these global numbers, but mortality is pretty high due to rampant crime. 20,000 were murdered in 2011. Murder rate is much much higher than other nations that get more media coverage, such as Mexico or Colombia. Caracas' murder rate was #1 in the world not too long ago.
Another thing is immigration. Pretty much most people who can leave, leave. However I recently read that less than 50,000 Venezuelans have emigrated to the US in the past 5 years, which is less than, say, Colombia (over 50k).
We hope we can turn the country around. Presidential elections are in 4 days.
I guess you're talking about the graph on the right. The bottom axis is quite clear, I guess, and the left axis is the population size, which seemed sufficiently clear to me for not mentioning it.
I added some legend where I saw it fit + a link to wikipedia explaining what a population pyramid is. That said, most people that land on the page are looking for population pyramids (from their google keywords) so there is not so much point to explain what it is.
Asia is, without a doubt, going to be a crucial market, but, for whatever reason, Asian countries don't seem to be very good at software development yet compared to the U.S. and Europe.
People seem to forget Europe is the largest economy in the world. It has the talent, is mostly developed, with free trade laws and no software patents.
The main thing holding Europe back right now is language. With a unified language Europe would be an amazing market to aim for.
[Europe] has the talent, is mostly developed, with free trade laws and no software patents.
Unfortunately, while we have so far kept EU-level legislation legitimising software patents off the books, the price seems to be a continuing lack of consistency in patent rules across Europe. They may not be called software patents, but that doesn't mean there haven't been patents granted in some jurisdictions that you or I might describe in those terms.
Whether any such patents would be enforceable in practice is another question again, but now we’re back to whether you have the stomach to get into a lawsuit over it, and a largely unquantifiable threat to software businesses.
The main thing holding Europe back right now is language.
Well, that and the fact that it’s still relatively difficult to accept money from customers on-line. We’ve been looking into this lately, and in some ways the situation does seem to be improving. However, for whatever reason our payment services market here still seems to be lagging several years behind what is available in some other places, notably the US. To us, this is a far bigger practical problem than any theoretical concerns about software patents.
No, it's just a bug. I have been using two sets of data where the name of the countries were not perfectly matching (example: United States VS United States of America). I fixed most of the inconsistencies and showed the map to some people to help me spot the problems. This one slipped through (as the geocoding of Serbia and some NaN).
Unfortunately, the way I animate this graph is very basic and I did not take time to make it perfect (the data crunching, SEO optimization and UI fine tunings already took way more time than I wanted to put in this). This is just a hobby project for me.