Wolfram Alpha to Launch Live on Justin.TV

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23524/

by abstractbill • 17 years ago

50 42 17 years ago

justin• 17 years ago

Excited to see it in action and get a chance to play with it myself!

271828182842• 17 years ago

The actual blog post at http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/going-live-and-webca... says, "We’ll be making our first attempt to go live with Wolfram|Alpha this Friday evening, May 15. We’ll start webcasting our preparations at 7pm CDT (UTC -5)."

I don't know how I feel about a Friday night launch. On the one hand the weekend allows for fixing problems, but on the other hand they are doing a webcast and have been building publicity for more than a month.

TweedHeads2• 17 years ago

Tuesday is the best marketing day for everything.

pg• 17 years ago

Except everyone thinks that, which means there is more competition for attention on Tues than any other day.

quizbiz2• 17 years ago

why?

programnature3• 17 years ago

In the meantime, they just released a screencast demo done by Stephen Wolfram. It seems to be getting lost in the other news of the day but its pretty cool.

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/13/stephen-wolframs-int...

martythemaniak• 17 years ago

After seeing that, I strongly suspect my browser will get a 3rd text box next go the google search.

gustavo_duarte2• 17 years ago

Whoah! I've used Mathematica a lot and I had high expectations for Wolfram Alpha, but this... was just incredible. Thank you so much for posting it.

I wonder if they'd consider opening the system up for others to develop 'plug-ins' covering more knowledge areas.

abstractbill4• 17 years ago

That is some really amazing stuff. I can't wait to play with it myself.

ErrantX5• 17 years ago

one thing that strikes me how can it logically say "the gdp of france / italy" should be interpreted as "the gdp of france divided by the gdp of Italy" that makes no sense to me.... clearly the context suggests that I want to know the GDP of both countries side by side.

Actually im underwhelmed by it :( which is sad.

gustavo_duarte2• 17 years ago

He mentions that simply putting items in a series would generate comparisons, so I think you'd get what you want by taking out the / operator.

(edited, no need for "vs.", just series seems to do the trick)

noodle2• 17 years ago

because it interprets "/" as mathematical division and "vs." as comparison.

they chose to use some specific, static operators so that you can do interesting things with the data, instead of having it simplify your request to what you "probably" want.

programnature3• 17 years ago

That is an interesting interpretation, though I think its correct to assume that you are trying to specify a computation rather than presentation.

In general its best to thing of that input field as a API with a huge syntax space, rather than something that is actually "understanding" anything. Getting the side-by-side comparisons can be done in many ways, like just using a comma instead of /

byrneseyeview2• 17 years ago

So... at about 3:30, he enters "6000 words". One of the calculations is wrong (screenshot: http://byrneseyeview.tumblr.com/post/107322432/i-was-just-wa...).

Am I missing something? Did the Mathematica inventor do a screencast with a multiplication error? Or is he using a video / mockup rather than an actual Alpha?

nimbix• 17 years ago

There are 5999 spaces between words. But that still leaves him 1 character short.

ftse• 17 years ago

It looks incredible. I think Google are right to be concerned. Others should be too - take the mortgage example: it wouldn't be hard to integrate current deals on offer from mortgage providers.

One query I'd like to build is a TCO for a particular model of car based on running cost, service cost and the probability I will die in a crash which obviously limits my future earnings.

ErrantX5• 17 years ago

Big fail going with Justin.tv. A lot of us refuse to use it because they still insist on spammy popups :(

A coup for justin.tv though.

emmett• 17 years ago

Popups? You mean video overlay ads?

abstractbill4• 17 years ago

Spammy popups? Definitely not to my knowledge. If anyone ever sees anything like this, please do take a screen-grab and email it to me - bill@justin.tv

quizbiz2• 17 years ago

God, I love HN

ErrantX5• 17 years ago

Whenever I visit justin.tv I get a "blocking a popup from justin.tv" notice on FF bar. At work w/o the popup blocker it opens a poker popup.

I seem to recall it is just some pages though - I will dig out a screeny.

EDIT: voila: http://screencast.com/t/rP72HQ0UG

catch23• 17 years ago

you sure you don't have a virus on your computer? most viruses will put spammy popups on other people's web pages.

271828182842• 17 years ago

I don't like the idea of a web cast for something like this, but if I were going to do one, I would use something like Hulu which is all the rage right now anyway. It is marketing, and Hulu has been getting a lot more air time than Justin.tv

pj3• 17 years ago

The success of WA is going to depend on the comprehensiveness of the data sets. If the user goes there and wants an answer and the topic of interest isn't in their dataset, then the user will revert to Google and wade through the results and read text to find the answers.

It doesn't appear to me that WA is searching text based information at all, rather these are tabular datasets that are carefully organized and queried to provide the user information.

Google is just looking for strings of text and especially strings of text from pages that have conformed to its requirements for SEO-ness leading to mostly marketing type information, where as WA is looking for facts and numbers.

I think most of the world doesn't really care about the kind of results they'll get from WA, but I don't care about that.

I think WA is a beautiful product. It isn't a google killer. Only those without a valid understanding of information would call it a google killer.

And Google Squared has nothing on WA. G^2 is just an attempt to steal WA's thunder. If Google would go to such extremes to hinder WA with their G^2, what does that say about Google's confidence in their product?

For too long, google has ridden on a history of good search results, but really, Google isn't much of an innovator. Most of their innovations were actually acquisitions. Eric Schmidt himself has said Google is not an innovator.

Here, WA is the innovator. Google is a me too and has been since their inception.

stcredzero2• 17 years ago

The success of WA is going to depend on the comprehensiveness of the data sets.

If you are correct, then WA can only get better and better over time. (Barring total incompetence.) So long as they can make good use of the failed queries, the user-base itself will guide what they include next.

Here, WA is the innovator. Google is a me too and has been since their inception.

The implication here that Google is the new Microsoft.

wmeredith• 17 years ago

This is contrarian BS. In terms of SERP quality it was like discovering another dimension when web pages started being assigned value based on incoming links vs. on-page content. It might have been all acquisitions after they got rich off that, but it was a huge deal. I don't think it can be overstated in the terms of how it's affected the internet, it changed everything.

pj3• 17 years ago

It gave you a job!

lacker• 17 years ago

G^2 is just an attempt to steal WA's thunder.

Come on, Wolfram Alpha was only announced a few months ago. G^2 was not developed in a few months. It's not like G^2 is a "response" to WA.

pj3• 17 years ago

It's way too early to be showing people the product. It is the timing of the demo that important.

natch• 17 years ago

I'm betting we'll see big-time video streaming fail when this happens. The people planning these events seem always to underestimate the bandwidth that is needed.

abstractbill4• 17 years ago

I'm betting we won't. Justin.TV has supported more than 700,000 simultaneous viewers already. As cool as I think Wolfram Alpha is, I don't think the launch will get that many viewers.

Mazy• 17 years ago

I think he's referring to the bandwidth needed on the broadcast side. It's not much, 300 Kbps up will do, but there are plenty of times where people do these events on shared connections etc. Always frustrating.

stcredzero2• 17 years ago

He will probably make a ton of money implementing this sort of system for corporations and their internal data.

Wolfram Alpha to Launch Live on Justin.TV

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