Wolfram Alpha just announced a useful new feature if you plan to follow Disrupt San Francisco closely. It has added CrunchBase data to its computational engine. You can now learn more about a specific startup, compare them or do any other computation with other Wolfram Alpha data.
Adding CrunchBase to its data sources is part of Wolfram Alpha’s ongoing effort to make everything computable. → Read More
Wolfram Alpha, the “computational knowledge engine” that quietly handles a large number of queries from Apple’s Siri, launched a new feature today that allows you to quickly get an overview of all your data on Facebook. The new report, says Wolfram CEO Stephen Wolfram, expands Wolfram Alpha’s “powers of analysis to give you all sorts of personal analytics.” The company plans to expand these… → Read More
Wolfram Alpha, the “computational knowledge engine,” just launched a desktop app for Windows 7 PCs through Intel’s AppUp store. After launching numerous iOS and Android apps (including for the B&N Nook and Amazon’s Kindle Fire), this is the first time Wolfram Alpha is introducing a dedicated desktop app for its service. The application costs $2.99 and is only available through Intel’s store. → Read More
I always enjoy seeing science fiction prophecies come true. Last month, Broadcastr. This month, Wolfram Alpha’s WolframTones, modestly subtitled “A New Kind Of Music.” (Yes, that would be the same breathtaking humility that led them to originally price the Wolfram Alpha app at a hilarious $50. Fortunately, they subsequently bought a clue.)
It is pretty cool, in a geeky sort of way: music … → Read More
The recent victory of IBM’s Watson computer against human competitors in an exhibition round of Jeopardy got computer scientist Stephen Wolfram thinking about how regular search engines might fare in such a match-up. So he took 200,000 known Jeapardy clues and ran them through six search engines (Google, Bing, Ask, Blekko, Wikipedia Search, and Yandex). He excluded known Jeopardy sites from the… → Read More
Computational search engine Wolfram Alpha is debuting its Android App in the Android Market today, simultaneously launching with the new T-Mobile G2 Android phone.
Similar to the iPhone app, WolframAlpha for Android is available for $1.99 in the Android Market. The app features the ability to search with a voice keyword, includes ten trillion data elements of knowledge, and tens of thousands of… → Read More
In October, computational engine Wolfram Alpha launched a slick iPhone app. The only problem? They miscalculated what it should cost. The app is great and all, but it’s simply not worth $50 when you can use the website for free.
Today, they launched their first major update to the app, version 1.1, which brings with it one new feature: new keyboards. Specifically, Wolfram Alpha now has a… → Read More
If you co-founded the company that became Google AdSense, as Gil Elbaz did with Applied Semantics, you don’t have any problem finding investors when you want to start a new venture. Elbaz sold Applied Semantics to Google for $100 million in 2003, and launched his latest startup, Factual, last October. He doesn’t really need the money, but so many all-star investors were clamoring to get in that… → Read More
There’s a lot to love about Wolfram Alpha’s iPhone app. But as regular readers will know, one of them is not the price. At $50, it’s just way too hard to justify the purchase when you can get all of the information online, for free. So just in time for the holidays, Wolfram Alpha is doing something about it: Slashing prices!
The app will be on sale for a much-more reasonable $19.99 starting… → Read More
A couple months ago, Wolfram Alpha launched an impressive iPhone application based on their “computational knowledge engine” (a fancy word for search engine predicated on math) of the same name. Unfortunately, they horribly miscalcuted what it should cost when they set the price at $50. But rather than simply lowering the price, they’re trying another trick.
As we pointed out at the time, one of… → Read More
Ever since Microsoft launched its Bing search engine last May, there’s been buzz that it’s been talking with Wolfram Alpha to license some of its search data. In August, I was able to confirm that a deal had indeed been struck between the two. Today, Bing is finally rolling out its first integration with Wolfram Alpha for searches around diet and nutrition.
Whenever you do a nutrition or… → Read More
Apple wasted little time approving Wolfram Alpha’s new iPhone app, which we hinted at last week. Just a few days after they submitted it to the store, Apple sailed it right through the approval process with such speed that it even surprised the Wolfram Alpha team, which had hoped to get some feedback from testers before the approval. I was one of those people, so rather than send them feedback… → Read More
While Wolfram Alpha, the website, has so far failed to capture the imagination of the public in a meaningful way, the core idea has always been about the data. And it does contain data that is interesting, and potentially quite useful if presented in the right way. And now others can try to figure that out, as that data takes center stage with the launch of Wolfram Alpha’s API today.
The company… → Read More
A few months ago, Google launched an experimental new search project, called Google Squared, that literally tries to take all the messy, unstructured information on the Web and put it into neat little, labeled boxes.
It is still very much in Labs, but today it got better. Google Squared can now deal with four times as many squares of data, 120 up from 30. Columns can now be sorted, and results… → Read More
Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram gave a report today listing what the team at Wolfram Alpha, his new search engine, did this summer. They added new knowledge domains and over 2 million lines of code, classified 54,233 bugs and suggestions, and generally fixed what doesn’t work. (“Close to half the time that Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t give a result, it’s . . . because it doesn’t understand… → Read More
In the past month, we’ve seen some new search engine launches. Two in particular were able to generate a hype cycle of early positive reviews and excitement: Bing and Wolfram Alpha. One was launched by Microsoft, and the other by a startup. It is inherently not a fair comparison because Microsoft has so much more money to spend on marketing ($80 to $100 million is earmarked for Bing)> But… → Read More
Google is taking a step towards taking all the messy, unstructured information on the Web and putting it into neat little, labeled boxes. Literally, that is what Google Squared does. First announced at last month’s Searchology event, Google Squared is now live. You can try it out.
Google Squared is an experimental search engine that is in its own “labs.” It gives you topical search results… → Read More
Wolfram Alpha is an early primitive. The new search engine that everybody is gushing over and that even Sergey Brin is keeping an eye on, is set to launch on Monday and may soft-launch as early as later today. If you can’t wait that long the first 50 TechCrunch readers to send an email to techcrunchpreview@wolfram.com will get invited to a fully-functioning preview. (Update: invites are way… → Read More
One of the next frontiers of search is taking all of the unstructured data spread helter-skelter across the Web and treat it like it is sitting in a nice, structured database. It is easier to get answers out of a database where everything is neatly labeled, stamped, and categorized. As the sheer volume of stuff on the Web keeps growing, keyword search keeps getting closer to its breaking point. … → Read More
Yesterday, days of hype culminated in the unveiling of the Wolfram Alpha search engine, which made its debut at a presentation put on by Harvard University’s Berkman Center. Unfortunately the resulting video footage turned out to be an exercise in frustration (or boredom). Not because it was uninteresting, mind you, but because we couldn’t see the apparently innovative search engine that creator… → Read More
There’s a lot of buzz swirling about Wolfram Alpha, the new computational search engine — perhaps too much. But regardless, people want to see the service in action to decide for themselves. And some of those people tuned into the preview webcast put on by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society yesterday. Unfortunately, if you listened in live, it was audio-only. But Harvard followed… → Read More
Today was supposed to be a big coming out party for stealthy search engine Wolfram Alpha. Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram gave the first public demonstration of his knowledge mining search engine at Harvard. But to be honest, not too many people were paying attention because A) who wants to sit through a two-hour Webcast and B) Google decided to tease its own efforts at adding structured data… → Read More
When it was first unveiled in March, Wolfram Alpha, a new type of search engine created by computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, got a lot of buzz. Naturally, some people threw out the “Google killer” title — but it seems to be a different beast, as it’s all about knowledge search. That is to say, you ask a question, and you get an answer — with Google, you ask a question and you get a link to a… → Read More
Editor’s note: Below is a guest post from Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, about a new computational knowledge engine called Wolfram Alpha being developed by computer scientist Stephen Wolfram. Spivack originally published it on Twine, and it is republished here with his permission. Some of the sections have been rearranged for clarity.
Stephen Wolfram is building something new — and it… → Read More
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