"SmartMoney" style data mapping software?

Hi. I am pretty new to advanced graphics, so excuse me in advance for ignorance of jargon…

I am looking for relatively affordable software (preferably $100 or less) for Windows XP which does essentially what the “market map” software, on the finance site Smartmoney.com, does.

I will attempt to describe it below, but it might be better to see it yourself at this url:

http://www.smartmoney.com/marketmap/

This is a powerful data display technique which uses simple 2D shapes plus color coding to map stock price information. Stocks are shapes which are arranged in areas which correspond to industrial sector. The stock shapes’ size corresponds to market capitalization. And their share price performance over a specifiable period corresponds to color (e.g. declines are red, advances are green).

Smartmoney licenses the software, but for $10,000. That’s a few orders of magnitude above what I can afford.

Does anyone know if there is a cheaper, competing variant out there?

If not – could someone at least tell me what the proper term for this sort of graph is, so that I could perhaps do more successful web searches for it? As it stands, googling “data map” indundates me with lots of irrelevant hits.

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

Lingyai

This isnt really OpenGL related but I will answer anyway. From what I cant see its not really the frontend (the graphics) you are paying for but for
the huge a$$ database that is behind all this.

Stock exchange information has always been expensive and this is especially true for preprocessed information like this.