https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18677902
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According to Many Eyes, this is a bubble chart. They say:
It is especially useful for data sets with dozens to hundreds of values, or with values that differ by several orders of magnitude.
...
To see the exact value of a circle on the chart, move your mouse over it. If you are charting more than one dimension, use the menu to choose which dimension to show. If your data set has multiple numeric columns, you can choose which column to base the circle sizes on by using the menu at the bottom of the chart.
Thus, any presentation with a lot of bubbles in it (especially with many small bubbles) would have to be dynamic to respond to the mouse.
My usual practice with bubble charts is to show three or four variables (x, y and another variable through the size of the bubble, and perhaps another variable with the color or shading of the bubble). With animation, you can show development over time too - see GapMinder. FlowingData provides a good example with a tutorial on how to make static bubble charts in R.
In the example shown in the question, though, the bubbles appear to be located somewhat to have similar companies close together. Even then, the exact design criteria are unclear to me. For example, I'd have expected Volkswagen to be closer to General Motors than Pfizer is (if some measure of company similarity is used to place the bubbles), but that isn't so in this diagram.
You could use Graphviz to produce a static version of a bubble chart, but there would be quite a lot of work involved to do so. You would have to preprocess the data to calculate a similarity matrix, obtain edge weights from that matrix, assign colours and sizes to each bubble and then have the preprocessing script write the Graphviz file with all edges hidden and run the Graphviz file through neato to draw it.
