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Wolfram's new website can identify objects in your photos
Wolfram Research can already do some pretty cool things, like answer Twitter questions and spot overhead flights. Now, the maker of the Mathematica programming language and Alpha knowledge engine can perform another trick: figuring out what's in a photo. The Wolfram Language Image Identification Project can make out about 10,000 common things, including animal species, gadgets and household objects. It uses a database of around ten million images to perform the trick, which Stephen Wolfram figures "is comparable to the number of distinct views of objects that humans get in their first couple of years of life."
Stephen Wolfram says he almost had a deal with Google, but it 'blew up'
As you may recall, Wolfram Research signed a deal with Microsoft a few years back that saw some Wolfram Alpha functionality integrated into Bing. As it turns out, it very nearly found its way into a certain other search engine as well. In an interview at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam today, Stephen Wolfram revealed that his company had tried to work with Google and "almost had a deal," but it "blew up." Unfortunately, he didn't provide any further details about when those talks took place or exactly what the potential deal entailed, and it doesn't sound like we can expect that deal to be revived anytime soon -- especially considering Google's own efforts that are increasingly overlapping with Wolfram Alpha. As Wolfram himself notes, though, the two companies do have something of a longstanding connection: Google co-founder Sergey Brin was actually an intern at Wolfram way back in 1993.
Wolfram Alpha releases first desktop PC app for Windows 7, makes homework even easier
Have a habit of letting Wolfram Alpha do your math for you? Well, say hello to one more tool in your computational arsenal -- the electronic homework lackey self-described knowledge engine is now available as a Windows 7 desktop app for $2.99 at the Intel AppUp store. In addition to providing desktop analytics on the works of the Bard, the Wolfram Alpha app features extended copy / paste support for graphics and queries, a full-screen optimized user interface and a special software keyboard with native support for special characters. If that isn't enough, the company also plans to drop even more knowledge at the AppUp center later this year in the form of "course assistant apps" for such geeky subjects as astronomy, physics and chemistry. Still got queries about the desktop app? Then satiate that thirst for information by imbibing in the PR after the break.
Wolfram Alpha in-app purchase for iOS adds advanced image processing capabilities
Version 1.4 of Wolfram Alpha has just landed in Apple's App Store, and in addition to a visual refresh for weather queries and the ability to procure items from Best Buy, users will also discover a new in-app purchase option that brings image analysis and manipulation to the venerable analytics platform. For $0.99, the new Image Input feature allows users to add filters, perform color processing and OCR recognition, detect features and view EXIF and histogram information of their photos. The Wolfram Alpha app itself will set you back $2.99, so if you've yet to hop aboard, you can expect to plunk down just shy of $4.00 for the app and its add-on -- no doubt a small price for true photo junkies.
Stephen Wolfram reveals the personal analytics of his life
Stephen Wolfram may now be best known as the creator of Wolfram Alpha, but he's been involved with data in one way or another for decades, and it turns out he's been collecting plenty of data about himself all that time. Now, he's taken things one step further and made some of that data public, offering a detailed analysis on his blog of his daily email and phone use, and even things like steps, keystrokes, and the occurrence of years in the 230,000 odd pages of documents he's scanned. What's perhaps most interesting, though, is that Wolfram only sees this as the beginning of personal analytics. He eventually hopes to be able to ask Wolfram Alpha all sorts of things about his life, with it not only able to "act as an adjunct to my personal memory," he says, "but also to be able to do automatic computational history -- explaining how and why things happened -- and then making projections and predictions." Interested in doing the same thing yourself one day? Better start hanging onto all that data.
Wolfram Alpha Pro now available, $4.99 a month will let you throw almost anything at it for analysis
Wolfram Alpha has made some fairly big strides in its few short years of existence, but the so-called computational knowledge engine has now rolled out what founder Stephen Wolfram says is the "the single most important development for Wolfram Alpha since the original website launched in 2009." That development is Wolfram Alpha Pro, a new premium service that will run you $4.99 a month (or $2.99/month for students) and give you access to a wealth of new options for both input and output. On the input end, you can now upload images, audio and other files (over 60 types in all) for automatic analysis and a detailed report -- according to Stephen Wolfram, the ultimate goal being "to do what a top data scientist would do if given the user's data." As for output, you'll now be able to take advantage of a number of richer download options, including the ability to interact with and tailor the reports to your liking. As you might expect, however, that's just scratching the surface -- you can get a detailed look at the new service at the links below, or take it for a spin yourself with a free trial subscription.
Best Buy teaches Wolfram Alpha (and Siri) new tricks
When it comes to Siri innovation, it's not just about work at Apple's end. Today, Wolfram Alpha introduced new shopping features built around Best Buy's public APIs. You can now use Siri queries to browse upwards of 35 thousand appliance and home computer products. You can say "Wolfram, tablet computers", "Wolfram, LG washing machines" or "Wolfram iPhone 4S" and Siri returns price information. For individual models, you'll also find product images, specs, and features. Wolfram's official blog explains, "We've taken the strengths we've developed in math, science, and socioeconomic data and created something equally unique and useful for online shoppers." Just a final warning: It's really hard to say "Wolfram, iPhone 4S" correctly. On the Wolfram end of things, I've found that it's useful to make a slight pause after saying Wolfram, and that pronouncing it as "wool-from" makes Siri happy. For the 4S? Good luck, mate.
Wolfram Alpha search engine now tracks flight paths, trajectory information
If you've ever looked up in the sky and wondered where a plane might be headed, Wolfram Alpha might just know the answer. The search engine, which recently began incorporating data from the FAA can now, with a five-minute delay from real-time data, use a flight's speed, heading and altitude to offer a projection of a plane's position. A search for 'flights overhead' via the Wolfram Alpha web site or app will use your location to pinpoint flights that should be visible to you. That string currently only works if the flight has at least one endpoint in the United States, so tracking international flights might be limited. Even so, this should allow you to look up flight delays, check when the next flight will be, see a cool interactive sky map and track a specific flight, of course. You'll have no valid excuse for being late to pick a friend up from the airport ever again.
Wolfram launches open CDF format, adds visual pizzazz to charts and graphs
Amazon's Kindle DX and RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook were supposed to be the business world's answer to an on-the-go office. Turns out, PDFs viewed in e-ink or on a tethered slate don't offer much in the way of interactive app experiences -- they're still just documents, no matter the tablet they're wearing. Well, Wolfram Group's got an open format contender to Adobe's throne and it's hoping you'll adopt it. Introduced today, the Computable Document Format "puts easy-to-author interactivity at its core," breathing animated life into otherwise static infographics. Not a programmer? No need to worry, the company promises the two-way diagrams are "easy enough for teachers, journalists, managers, [and] researchers to... create." We've seen Microsoft's XPS take a similar crack at dethroning the reigning format king, only to find itself in portable document oblivion. We'll just have to wait and see if CDF's a more noble contender. In the meantime, head on over to the source to download the free player and see for yourself the possible future of live textbooks, tables and charts.
The making of The Elements for iPad
Popular Science takes an in-depth look into the makings of The Elements: A Visual Exploration for the iPad, the app that's had many reviewers nearly swooning with giddy geek pleasure. The article is written by the original book's author and Wolfram Research's co-founder, Theodore Gray, who described the experience as the chance to create something that "Harry Potter might check out of Hogwarts' library." The article is a fantastic read and is definitely worth checking out, especially if you have any interest in getting into media publication for the iPad, and how to design dynamic pages that Photoshop nor InDesign simply can't pull off. They took a library of nearly 350,000 images shot for the original book, combined it with a page layout tool constructed from scratch with Mathematica and added a runtime application code to turn those pages (processed on the fastest 8-core Mac Pro out there) into a beautiful iPad book that is truly worthy of Hogwarts. In addition to the Popular Science interview, check out the above video that debuted on Gray's YouTube channel for the book for an additional look at the book.
Happy 5th birthday (plus or minus a few months) TUAW!
While writing up a short post about Wolfram|Alpha yesterday, I decided to test the service by entering a few domain names to see what kind of results I would get. I typed in TUAW.com and Macworld.com, and was pleased to see a comparison of daily hit statistics, but what really surprised me was to find that the TUAW.com domain went online on June 16th, 2004. That, of course, makes us five years old today!We contacted Scott McNulty and Laurie Duncan, two former TUAW editors, who filled us in on some details. The first "soft launch" TUAW post was actually made on January 27, 2004 by Jason Calacanis -- it has survived a number of design changes and can be viewed here. One of the earliest examples of real-world content is Sean Bonner's post here. So is Wolfram Alpha wrong? Not precisely: those early posts appeared under the "apple.weblogsinc.com" domain, which later migrated to TUAW.com. What's happened in those five short years? The switch to Intel processors, Tiger, Leopard, the iPod nano, shuffle, and touch, and a little something called the iPhone. It's been a lot of fun for all of the bloggers who have been involved, and we hope that TUAW has been and will continue to be among your favorite sources for Apple news.I'm curious -- what changes do you think we'll see in the next five years? Leave a comment below.
Mathematica 6 ships
You may recall that back at WWDC'05 when Jobs announced the switch to Intel, one of the companies he invited on stage to discuss creating Universal Binaries was Wolfram Research, whose flagship product Mathematica is probably the leading desktop mathematics application. Mathematica has now reached version 6 and the new features are manifold, representing (according to Wolfram) the "most important advance in the 20-year history of Mathematica." Not having much understanding of these things beyond attempting to use it back in college to do my calculus homework for me, it does seem that there's a lot new, including Dynamic Interactivity and "over 1000 new computational functions & interface enhancements."One downside of the new release for Mac users, however, is that version 6 remains a 32 bit application in OS X despite the availability of 64 bit versions for Windows, Linux, and various Unix flavors. Mathematica 6 is available now at a variety of different price points (education, etc.), with the standard professional version coming in at a cool $2495 for Mac.Thanks, Stern!Update: It was pointed out in the comments below that, although it is not enabled by default, it is possible to get 64 bit support on Intel in OS X by following these instructions. Thanks, Geoff!
