Wolfram Alpha Pro, $5/month, $3 for Students

[Caiyuo]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399911,00.asp

Data Geeks, Meet Wolfram Alpha Pro

Wolfram Alpha Pro provides a showcase for Wolfram's Computational Document Format (CDF), essentially an in-document app for interacting with the data, rather than reading a static report. In some of the modules where Wolfram Alpha Pro provides its analysis, an orange link to the bottom right invites users to "enable interactivity." Doing so launches a viewer by which users can change the scale of a mathematical graph, for example, or even alter the formula. The context of the interactivity varies with the data and the inputs. When Wolfram Alpha launched in 2009, its "computational knowledge engine" proved to be a data-driven encyclopedia for the masses. Now, Wolfram Alpha Pro takes the wonkiness a step further.

Launching today, the paid service will allow users to apply the site's analysis tools to a variety of inputs, from complex mathematical computations to OCR textual analysis to even just the interrelationships between a number of email contacts. The difference, however, is that scholars will pay for access—to the tune of $4.95 per month, or $2.99 for students—and the output Wolfram Alpha Pro produces will be able to be manipulated by the user.

What Wolfram Alpha Pro does is two-fold. It can respond to queries, like the basic version of the Wolfram Alpha site. But it can also take inputs in up to 60 different data formats, whether it be an image copied from another Web site or a data analysis of binary structure of a data file.

Stephen Wolfram, the co-founder of Mathematica, explained that the purpose of Wolfram Alpha Pro was to give users all of the tools of a data scientist, backed by the the site's knowledge of actual data about the world, and make it "dead easy" to operate via natural-language processing. But instead of querying the site's database for its own records as the basic Wolfram Alpha site does, Wolfram Alpha Pro factors in user data as part of the equation.

"We're not just dealing with knowledge from the world at large, we're also dealing with a kind of individual knowledge that people have, and take data that people have, and upload it, and allow them to dip into it," Wolfram said.

Throw Your Data at It, See What Sticks
Put another way, "you take the data, throw it at Wolfram Alpha Pro, and see what it has to say about it," Wolfram said.

It turns out that's a good way to describe what Wolfram Alpha Pro does—during a demonstration of the technology, Wolfram Alpha Pro graphed a complex function, did edge detection on a photograph of lions, analyzed the color composition of a picture of a page from a text, and produced a timeline plot of a series of emails that included words like "Facebook" and "friends". Users can ask a direct question of the service, or simply upload an input and see what Wolfram Alpha Pro finds interesting about it.

That prompted a question from a reporter on what consumers would find worthwhile, if anything, about the technology. Wolfram replied that the image processing tools now built into Mathematica—and, by extension, into Wolfram Alpha Pro—would be something that users could send along to their friends. Users can also save their data in a CDF format, Wolfram said.

Early on, the site will restrict users to a computation that the site can perform in just a few seconds, with the option to retry the calculation if it can't be completed in the allotted time. In the future, Wolfram said he hopes to have better mechanisms to allow a complex calculation that could take an hour to perform, for example.

Like Wolfram's iOS app, a mobile version is due shortly, with an Android version coming later.

[Anton]

I remember reading somewhere about this Wolfram software... supposedly it's a vast improvement on the google algorithms that predict what you're going to type before you type it, based on similar results, syntax, and a bunch of other things you wouldn't have thought about. For example, adding "am" to a number greatly changes the game. Now it's either a time or a radio station.

[Caiyuo]

It's essentially like a computational answer-based version of a search engine on steroids; excellent resource for students, even more-so with the pro version and pricing incentive.

[Kaylia]

Can it write a scientific article or a thesis using my research data? I'm not interested otherwise.


Also, fuck Wolfram for putting his name everywhere. I hate him nearly as much as Sid Meier

[Maguspk]

2.99 a month seems like so much for some reason. I'm not even poor but apparently I'm a cheap motherfucker.

[Correction]

2.99 a month seems like so much for some reason. I'm not even poor but apparently I'm a cheap motherfucker.

It is a drop in the fucking bucket compared to what people pay for Lexis-Nexis, or actual journal subscriptions.

[Elesirdur]

Though if you are a student, your university should have access to journal databases like Jstor or Lexis which you can access through a VPN or web portal anyway. I've found Wolfram extremely helpful for checking my math and calculus work. However, if you're using Wolfram for computational stuff you can get a student license of Mathematica for $100.

[Woozie]

Wolfram software = skynet and if you buy it you're helping to bring about the end of the world

[Caiyuo]

Wow I had no idea people fucking hated Wolfram lol. Mind giving context? No horse in this race, just thought this was fairly big news for those it's targeted towards.

[Kerberoz]

$36 a year for a search engine is too damn much, unless it's sapient. That's only $3 less than I pay for a year of 2-day shipping...

[isladar]

Wolfram software = skynet and if you buy it you're helping to bring about the end of the world

One of my best friends is the lead everything for like, all of Wolfram's shit. I do not doubt that he will be the one to make skynet.