One of the big things we pride ourselves on at The CulturalConnect is finding talent for our various magazines. When we first started out in August 2005 (click here for debut issue!), Sumaya and I would search the corners of the country for all the amazingly talented people we profiled. As we created more magazines, we took on a staff and found ourselves managing them to scour for talent. And as we grew even larger, Sumaya, Kaiser, and I decided that I would focus solely on business strategy and development…no more profiling But occasionally, I still get the opportunity to profile people.

But today I came across a project started by a young South Asian called gCensus. gCensus is meant to take population characteristics from U.S. Census data across geographic data in Google Earth, so we can visualize a wide variety of data over detailed maps. It’s going to be free and accessible to the public and a great way to look at information such as population density, age, and race. The example below is a gCensus map of the population per block in Berkeley, CA.

gCensus is a project by a young Bangladeshi-American grad student at Stanford, Imran Haque. When I did some investigating on Mr. Haque, I realized he focuses his research in Computational Biology. gCensus is merely a side project! There’s a lot of great things to be coming from this young grad student, especially from gCensus. It’s at its fledgling stages, so once it starts gaining some momentum, we’ll be trying to get Mr. Haque for The DesiConnect.