Thx. Me and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=martian wrote the software to make it. Martian made that particular map.

Where did you get the data? Is it free? I'd love to make some realtime software like this.

Many places. World Bank, Census, IMF etc. Do a text search on this page: http://uuorld.com/portal/ for "set:" Each set is free from its source but they require lots of tedious massaging to reformat.

Why the downvote? I'm genuinely confused. I guess I could have read the link better, maybe this thread isn't talking about that?

I didn't down-vote you but I was talking about the raw statistics used as input to the visualization engine. I had assumed you wanted to build some data-visualization software and was pointing out the places to get stats.