"I'm telling you, this company is getting hot . . ."
So began a pair of insistent emails from a friend and colleague about a company in the area I needed to check out. It turns out there's a Google-killer right down the road in Champaign, home to the University of Illinois and the start-up website, Wolfram|Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com).
I say start-up "website" because this venture is the offspring of the 20+-year-old company Wolfram Research, which publishes the well-respected analytics software package Mathematica.
Though I am not a Mathematica user (like it, but I'm addicted to free), Wolfram|Alpha seems to be a web-based portal for accessing the Mathematica analytic engine and applying it to a large library of data. The interface is designed to take natural language queries and return results in a format that will span a presumed range of intentions and levels of sophistication of the user, as well as allowing for further drill-downs where appropriate. Hard to describe, so check out the easy-to-use site to get the drift.
The mission of the site/business is "making the world's knowledge computable". Bold mission, that, and appropriately so for a Google-killer (not that I've seen these guys calling themselves that).
This seems like a great concept, and it makes sense as a true leap ahead in what a "search engine" does. It will be interesting to see how it develops with more data and more users pointing it in unexpected directions.
Spending time as we do with how to make analytics easily accessible to business users, it's obvious to see applications of this interface combining public-domain and company data to enable business people to ask a wide range of intuitive questions. Perhaps the guys who should be worried are not Google but Oracle, IBM, and SAP.
Since this looks not only relevant, but fun, I plan to spend some time with the site and will report here on that experience. We have a couple of client projects starting up that should provide some real-world occasions to put the site to the test.
Also, these guys took the interesting step of streaming a live video of their launch. It's long (about 1 1/2 hrs.), but an interesting peek at the site and the process of taking it live.
Watch live video from Wolfram|Alpha on Justin.tv
Enjoy.
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