Deiter Bohn reports that Wolfram Alpha is now offering a “Pro” version of their data analysis services for just $4.99 a month: “The new services includes the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry. The ‘reports’ that Wolfram Alpha kicks out as a result of these (or any) query are also beefed up for Pro users, some will actually become interactive charts and all of them can be more easily exported in a variety of formats. [The Verge] sat down with Stephen Wolfram himself to get a tour of the new features and to discuss what they mean for his goal of ‘making the world’s knowledge computable.’” Read more

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 Wolfram Alpha has been launched and is available for the public to try. I sat down to play with it.

FIrstly (using the rare American adverb here – don’t be confused), you can’t expect Wolfram Alpha to act like Google. It is a new kind of search engine, as one should expect from Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram is famously the inventor of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science.

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I was a bit … weird … as a teenager. As part of an Air Force family we moved frequently, and like most teenagers trying to distinguish themselves from their peers, I tried to use my strengths – an active intellect and an ease at working with abstractions – as a way of establishing myself in the new schools I constantly found myself in. I was the "smart kid", the one who took to carrying around large books with titles such as "Principia Mathematica" by Bertrand Russell and Whitehead Alfred North in order to impress people with my intelligence (okay, so perhaps my social intelligence was not quite as well developed at that stage).

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Stephen Wolfram generously gave me a two-hour demo of Wolfram Alpha last evening, and I was quite positively impressed.  As he said, it’s not AI, and not aiming to be, so it shouldn’t be measured by contrasting it with HAL or Cyc but with Google or Yahoo. 

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