Curiously enough, it took much less time than what I thought to turn this thing into a pseudo-real time interface. Here it is:
Visualization of coffee bag production from Francisco Dans on Vimeo.
The green dots indicate that a coffee bean bag has been produced within the last few seconds. Cool, right?
Obviously it’s not real time data. I took the total coffee production per country figures, and spread the production through the year for each country. Every time the current time coincides with the time in which a bag is expected to be produced by a country, the red light turns green (sorry about the dodgy explanation. I don’t want to get too technical, but the map function has a great deal of responsibility on this).
Finally, success!!