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Wolfram Alpha – A Force To Be Reckoned With

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by Keith Kleiner on July 27th, 2009

Two months ago Wolfram Alpha launched its question answering engine in one of the most eagerly anticipated product launches of the year.  Although sensationalists wanted to call Wolfram Alpha a Google killer, here at the Hub we have consistently viewed Wolfram Alpha as a valuable complementary tool to Google rather than a direct competitor.  Just a few weeks ago at sci foo 2009 I was able to sit in on a presentation from Wolfram Alpha Co-founder Theodore Gray in which he gave an update on the status of the service.  My takeaway was the same as before: Wolfram Alpha is the real deal.  This is a serious company backed by some really smart people and a formidable technology.

Computing The Answer To Your Question...

Computing The Answer To Your Question...

As I noted earlier, the presentation from Theodore Gray was quite an experience given that more than half of the 12 or so people in the room joining me to watch the presentation were serious big hitters at Google (VP’s and higher) that I know personally.  So we’ve got the co-founder of Wolfram Alpha basically revealing some pretty juicy details of his service to a very interesting crowd – quite a setting.

One of the most interesting insights I gathered from Theodore is that Wolfram Alpha is not simply sitting on its laurels letting its service stagnate and languish.  Quite the opposite is true in fact – these guys are modifying and innovating their service at light speed. With hundreds of thousands of users now pounding on the service everyday, Wolfram Alpha is able to learn about bugs and kinks in the system at a blistering pace.  In fact this is one of the primary reasons that the service was launched when it was, even though it wasn’t as polished as Wolfram Alpha might have hoped.  Wolfram Alpha wanted to leverage the power of millions of users to largely automate the detection of the service’s myriad flaws.  Each day the Wolfram Alpha engine is improving as tiny problems are identified either by users directly or by analyzing the logs, and then fixed.  The website’s interface itself, just like Google, remains ever the same with only a deceivingly simple search box, but behind the scenes the service is constantly evolving.

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Excited About The Wolfram Alpha Launch? Watch It On A Webcast – Seriously!

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by Keith Kleiner on May 15th, 2009

wolfram-alpha1With the relentless barrage of Wolfram Alpha media coverage all over the net these days (including plenty here at the Hub), it is easy to get “news fatigue” about the company.  You start wanting to tune them out.  You might even start disliking the company, hoping for the demise of the media’s latest darling.  But Wolfram Alpha is different.

In its latest show of innovation, we now learn that Wolfram Alpha will turn its launch into a “community” event.  People the world over can watch the Wolfram Alpha team on a live webcast as they try to pull off their ambitious launch.  Although the site is officially slated to launch on May 18, starting later today anyone interested can watch the Wolfram Alpha team as they build up for the official launch on a public channel on Justin.tv.

This very public, community style launch is one of the first of its kind, and it is brilliant.  Wolfram Alpha’s “community” launch humanizes the company by allowing us to take a peek inside and watch the engineers as they attempt to pull off their task.  Now any failures or glitches that occur during the launch will be seen as stumbles that we can all identify with, rather than as mishaps to be ridiculed.  The huge pressure that has been building up for a flawless first day launch is thus conveniently deflated.  We are now converted into fans of the Wolfram Alpha launch team, rooting for them and even conversing with them as they work.

Even as Wolfram Alpha seeks to shake up the information industry with its new question answering engine, it is clear that the company is also charting new territory in the way that a fledgling company can present itself to the world.  Just last week we wrote about Wolfram Alpha’s highly innovative and unorthodox “all at once” launch strategy.  Now they are innovating with a webcast of the launch.  It seems every time I feel myself getting sick of the company, Wolfram Alpha comes out with another cool innovation that draws me back in to root for them.  This is definitely a company to watch.

Wolfram Alpha Official Launch May 18 – Check Out Their Datacenter (Video)

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by Keith Kleiner on May 11th, 2009

wolfram-alpha1Is the new question answering service from Wolfram Alpha a big stud or a big dud?  According to a recent post from the Wolfram Alpha blog, we will all get to decide for ourselves when the service officially launches on May 18.  Criticism aside, there is plenty of evidence from interviews and demos that Wolfram Alpha will be good at some tasks and bad at others, but overall a worthy addition to our information gathering toolboxes. (check out our previous coverage)

One of the most interesting things about the Wolfram Alpha launch is its hugely publicized nature.  Most internet services launch quietly in an alpha or beta stage and then slowly improve features and access to the public as the kinks are worked out.  Wolfram Alpha has forgone this proven technique, instead going for a much publicized “all at once” launch, creating an enviable level of interest, but also enormous expectations that may be impossible to meet.

The much publicized launch also creates a serious (and expensive!) engineering challenge for the Wolfram Alpha operations team responsible for building the infrastructure for the service.  On May 18 Wolfram Alpha is going to receive an enormous influx of traffic as everyone and their dog attempts to give the service a go.  Traffic on launch day will easily be an order of magnitude greater than what the service will normally see in its immediate lifetime afterward.  This will require an expensive order of magnitude increase in the number of computers and networking gear needed to support the first day launch, significantly increasing the day one complexity and failure probability of the service.

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