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Posts Tagged ‘wolfram’

In October, computational engine Wolfram Alpha launched a slick iPhone app. The only problem? They miscalculated what it should cost. The app is great and all, but it’s simply not worth $50 when you can use the website for free.

Today, they launched their first major update to the app, version 1.1, which brings with it one new feature: new keyboards. Specifically, Wolfram Alpha now has a “default” keyboard, a “math” keyboard, a “Greek” keyboard, and a “symbol” keyboard. As they describe it, “the specialized keyboards that greet you when you first open the Wolfram|Alpha App, have been painstakingly constructed to ease the burden of entering queries.” Fair enough, these are definitely nice to have for advanced queries. But do they justify the $50 price yet? Nope.

To be fair, Wolfram Alpha also launched some updated graphics and tables with the new version of the app, but it’s still all the same data you can get on the website — again, for free. And while they slyly removed the iPhone-optimized version of the website in an attempt to try and get people to buy the app, that still doesn’t appear to be happening in droves. In fact, the smartest calculation they’ve made was slashing the price down to the more reasonable $19.99 for the holidays (it’s now back at $49.99).

When compared to the just-released $1,000 iPhone app, BarMax, Wolfram Alpha may seem like a steal. But for the third time, all the Wolfram Alpha data is available for free on the web. And you can access it on your iPhone through the browser, it just won’t presented as pretty. I’m not saying they shouldn’t charge for the app; they should. But something a lot less than $50. BarMax may actually be worth the $1,000, but only because it’s replacing a program that costs $3,000 to $4,000.

Still, if keyboards are your thing, find the $50 Wolfram Alpha app in the App Store here.

Every year as broadband reaches more people, online education keeps growing and growing. So far, though, most online education focusses on vocational courses, test preparation, or supplemental tutoring. One startup trying to bring entire degree programs online is 2tor, which just closed a $20 million Series B funding at a rumored valuation of around $100 million. Highland Capital Partners led the round, with previous investors Redpoint, Novak Biddle, and City Light Capital participating. Last June, the company raised $10 million in a Series A.

“What is unique about 2tor is they are the first online education program to go after the high end—elite programs at elite schools,” says Paul Maeder, a founder and general partner at Highland who will be taking a board seat. 2tor was founded by John Katzman, who previously founded test-prep giant Princeton Review. Originally, he wanted to start 2tor as a division of the Princeton Review, but it goes after such a different part of the education market that he decided to pursue it as a standalone startup instead. In partnership with universities and graduate programs, 2tor designs and produces fully-accredited online degree programs, and even recruits the students as well.

The first school to use 2tor is USC for its Masters of Art in Teaching. USC faculty teach the course, which they help design, and 2tor provides the technology platform. Students from all around the country can take classes online, watching high-quality video lectures, check assignments, sign up for online office hours, and use online chat to talk to other students. “It is more like Facebook than like Blackboard,” says Katzman, (Blackboard is one of the more established online learning platforms). “What’s great about a great university are the other students. You want a platform that at its core is conversation,” says Katzman.”

The USC graduate program in teaching has about 75 students on campus, but almost 750 online who all pay the same tuition. “The notion that if you are a professor there you can help dozens of students in southern California is great,” says Katzman, “but the notion that you can help thousands of students across the country is even better.” The promise of online education is that schools are no longer constrained by physical location or classroom size (although each online class itself can be smaller in number of students).

Katzman is in negotiations with more universities to open up two or three more programs this year. Initially, he is concentrating on graduate programs for nursing, MBAs, and possibly engineering. Each program is designed in partnership with the faculty who come up with the curriculum and teach it, with 2tor then acting as the producer, student recruiter, and IT shop. Revenues for each class will be split between the universities and 2tor.

“Education is an enormous market still being delivered by and large the way it was by Socrates,” says Maeder. “It is a mediocre educational experience to lock people in a room and talk at them for an hour and a half.” He thinks 2tor can help change the way people learn.

A couple months ago, Wolfram Alpha launched an impressive iPhone application based on their “computational knowledge engine” (a fancy word for search engine predicated on math) of the same name. Unfortunately, they horribly miscalcuted what it should cost when they set the price at $50. But rather than simply lowering the price, they’re trying another trick.

As we pointed out at the time, one of the most humorous things about the app’s pricing is that the mobile version of Wolfram Alpha was completely free. Free beats $50 any day of the week, and I think WolframAlpha finally realized that as they have decided to destroy the mobile web version that was tailored for the iPhone and iPod touch, which TUAW noticed today.

Now, when you point your iPhone’s browser to wolframalpha.com, you’ll be greeted by a pop-up letting you know that the WolframAlpha app is now available in the app store, complete with a link to go there and download it. You can also click the “X” to close this popup, but if you do, you’ll be greeted by a version of the site that is the same as the regular web site — which is to say, not at all tailored for a smaller mobile screen. It’s still usable of course, but it is much worse than the previously custom formatted version.

If you try to go to wolframalpha.com/iphone (the page where wolframalpha.com would redirect to if it detected mobile Safari), you’re greeted with a full page once again touting the iPhone app. What’s humorous about this page is that it’s also not at all tailored for the iPhone. Come on guys, you could have at least made the page that is trying to sell the iPhone app to iPhone users look nice on the device.

Despite Apple featuring the app in the App Store, indications are that it’s simply not selling like hotcakes. One indicator: There are only 30 reviews for the app so far. Many popular apps have thousands of reviews. And many of WolframAlpha’s reviews are simply bitching about the price. Another indicator: The app is nowhere to be found in the top 100 grossing apps, the area Apple made in the App Store specifically to help showcase more expensive apps. If a $50 app is not among the highest grossing, that’s not a good sign for its sales.

The bottom line: The app is still too expensive. And nuking the iPhone-optimized version is not going to change that.

If you do happen to have $50 just burning a hole in your pocket, you can find the app here.

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Wow. Marketing email software provider ExactTarget has secured another $70 million in funding, according to an SEC filing, bringing the startup’s total funding this year alone to $145 million. The company raised $70 million earlier this year from Battery Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Montagu Newhall. Not too shabby considering the state of the economy.

The latest round of funding comes from Technology Crossover Ventures, (TCV) according to a report in the Indianapolis Business Journal. The VC firm has also invested in HomeAway, Zillow, eHarmony, WhitePages.com, Expedia, Orbitz and Netflix.

When we reported on ExactTarget’s earlier funding, the startup said it would delay its IPO plan and had withdrawn its application with the SEC to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol EXTG. Interestingly, TCV has helped guide many startups in its portfolio to an IPO, so it makes me wonder if ExactTarget is readying itself to go public in 2010.

ExactTarget’s software provides enterprises with email marketing platform that powers everything from email coupon offers and automated fraud alerts to e-statements and SMS text messages. ExactTarget’s software provides email marketing tools for a widespread group of big-name clients, including CareerBuilder.com, Expedia.com, the Gannett Co., and The Home Depot. The software is also integrated on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

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AOL won’t officially become an independently traded company again until December 10 when CEO Tim Armstrong is scheduled to ring the bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. When AOL announced the details of the spin-off last month, it was possible to estimate a valuation for AOL at about $3.15 billion, but as I noted then, we wouldn’t really know for sure until the shares start trading. Well, some shares already are trading ahead of the official spin-off, settling at around $24. With 105.7 million shares to be distributed, that gives AOL a market cap of $2.5 billion.

It seems like AOL’s value just keeps on going down every time you look. Now, the shares are being very thinly traded right now, and we could still see a pop on December 10. But what is more likely is that there will be continued pressure on the stock as existing Time Warner shareholders take the money and run. It doesn’t help that some Wall Street analysts don’t forecast any growth whatsoever in either revenues or profits over the next four years.

For investors, AOL is really a turnaround and cost-cutting story. But Armstrong is hoping to change that perception. For instance, JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan writes in a note that he came away from a meeting with Armstrong with the impression that AOL will “pull back premium inventory from Ad.com and begin monetizing this inventory at a fuller valuation.” AOL’s own sites command higher ad revenues than the ads on its Ad.com network, but since 2007 it’s been making AOL ad inventory available through its ad networks, pushing down the value of those ads. If Armstrong follows through with this plan, it would be a step towards creating more scarcity for the ads which run on AOL properties, and could perhaps lead to higher revenues.

Armstrong needs to find more ways to juice revenues and profits if he wants his AOL options to be worth anything. A year from now, how much will AOL be worth?

By The End of 2010, What Will AOL’s Market Cap Be?(poll)

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Ever since Microsoft launched its Bing search engine last May, there’s been buzz that it’s been talking with Wolfram Alpha to license some of its search data. In August, I was able to confirm that a deal had indeed been struck between the two. Today, Bing is finally rolling out its first integration with Wolfram Alpha for searches around diet and nutrition.

Whenever you do a nutrition or diet-related search on Bing, it will serve up structured data from Wolfram. For instance, a search for any food item will bring up a nutrition tab and summarize nutrition facts about that kind of food, including the total fat in a single serving, along with the percentage of the recommended daily allowance that represents and other nutritional data. The results will be marked as “computed buy Wolfram Alpha.” Wolfram will also power a body mass index (BMI) calculator which lets you enter your height and weight, and calculates your BMI.

In that August post, I speculated:

Perhaps Bing’s deal with Wolfram is to license some of its data to create a specific science category search or a Q&A portion of the site.

Whatever it is, if it turns out to be popular, Bing might end up licensing more data for more categories of search. In the end, Wolfram could have more luck licensing its data to other search engines than bringing people to its site, despite the surge in “fall traffic” Stephen Wolfram is still hoping for.

There has been no discernible surge in fall traffic at Wolfram’s main site. Striking licensing deals with Bing could prove much more lucrative since Bing has much more search traffic and does a better job presenting complex data in an intuitive way.

Bing is also releasing two other improvements today. When you hover over a search result, it will bring in more information into the pop-up preview pane, including deep links to the most clicked-on pages in that site and a search box which lets you search the site without leaving Bing. If the result is a Facebook profile page, it will show the person’s picture, their network, and allow you to send a message or friend request.

The second improvement is a weather results page which brings together all sports of weather data whenever you search for a place or weather. Much of the data is what you can already find on MSN Weather—multi-day forecasts, satellite maps, and monthly averages—but it gathered on the fly in a new Weather Results page on Bing. You get the feeling that, just like it did yesterday with videos, this may be another content category Microsoft will eventually move entirely from MSN to Bing.

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The New York Times Company is considering the launch of a brand new online news reader that would let people experience the consumption of NYTimes.com content in an entirely new and fairly innovative way. The publisher has reached out to members of its Insight Lab to get some rudimentary feedback on the new reader prototype and to help settle the naming issue.

Insight Labs members can test out the new prototype on a live website, which means you can, too. All you need to do is head over to this web page and you’ll be able to play around with the ‘newview’ as well.

One of the names the NYT is considering for the new online reader is Article Skimmer, which is the same name that was given to a prototype product the publisher threw out there some time ago. But the new reader linked above boasts more features than the Article Skimmer that’s currently featured on First Look, which is basically a showcase for new NYTimes.com features and services.

This could be a sign that the company considers graduating the Article Skimmer experiment to a full-fledged mass product and giving it a new name for the occasion. Some other names it is suggesting in the survey: Grid View, Times View, Easy View, Broadsheet and Easy Reader.

(click for larger size)

Here’s how the NYT describes the new reader prototype:

NYTimes.com is launching a new online feature that offers the experience of reading a newspaper spread out on a table, allowing readers to more easily browse through headlines and discover stories deep within a section. Each section of the Web site is organized in an easy-to-read grid displaying the headlines and short summaries of each story. Full articles are one click away and keyboard short cuts provide easy navigation from section to section. Readers can select from among eight different skins to display content in the way that best meets their interests and needs.

Some of the themes (or skins) are fascinating. One called ‘Flows’ displays headlines, a short summary and the author of the article in a single, continuous stream of text, while another (’Blackout’) reminds me a lot of the TweetDeck design (see screenshot on top).

Evidently, there’s some place reserved for advertising units inside news content.

The keyboard shortcuts – which are mostly meant for navigation – are fairly useful, although not all of them worked flawlessly in my limited testing in both Firefox and Chrome. What’s more interesting is the fact that you can customize the content in your reader much more easily than on the regular NYtimes.com website, giving you the opportunity to filter what you see based on section, blogs, and topic. Surprisingly, there’s no option to display only articles from a specific writer.

Your thoughts on the new reader prototype?

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Google is taking a step towards taking all the messy, unstructured information on the Web and putting it into neat little, labeled boxes. Literally, that is what Google Squared does. First announced at last month’s Searchology event, Google Squared is now live. You can try it out.

Google Squared is an experimental search engine that is in its own “labs.” It gives you topical search results broken down by categories, something that Bing does in a different way with guided results in the left explore pane. Google Squared is more comparable to Wolfram Alpha in that it is A) really early stage, and B) goes and finds out every facet of a subject based on a single keyword search. But unlike Wolfram Alpha, it does not “compute” answers based on data that it has ingested into its own databases. Its database is the Web.

Does Google Squared crush Wolfram Alpha today? No. But as I originally suggested when it was announced, adding structure to the Web will eventually win out over a self-contained database. Even if it seems primitive today, its approach scales better than Wolfram’s.

Type in something like “planets” and the results come up as grid with the planet names, images, a short description, the equatorial surface, and the mean density. It only manages to identify seven planets, and those include Pluto and Ceres. (Where’s Uranus?) This is still very experimental. But you can add more rows and columns. When you click on the the “add” box under the planet names, for instance,, it will suggest the missing ones. Or you can add yor own category, and then it will fill in the other boxes in that row. You can also add a column. It suggests categories such as “Date of Discovery” and “Escape velocity” (which is important to know if you are planning to visit and want to ever return).

But how would you get to one of these planets? Well, you would need a spaceship, of course

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Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that you can use to compute systematic knowledge immediately. You can put in anything you would like to know and you can compare multiple results with each other. There is no need to know how to search; just type in what you want to know

Read more here:
Wolfram Alpha is ready for you to try

Today was supposed to be a big coming out party for stealthy search engine Wolfram Alpha. Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram gave the first public demonstration of his knowledge mining search engine at Harvard. But to be honest, not too many people were paying attention because A) who wants to sit through a two-hour Webcast and B) Google decided to tease its own efforts at adding structured data to search during the demo.

Not long after that, we received the screenshot above from an anonymous “benefactor” of Wolfram Alpha asking “which one is computing about the future?” The Wolfram screenshot shows a search for “ISS” and the results show the flight path and current position of the International Space Station, along with its altitude, velocity, inclination, orbit type, and other useful stats. Google population search, in contrast, plots basically one data point over time (although, you can easily add others). The suggestion is that Google quickly ginned up its public data search feature to undermine Wolfram’s debut. And it worked. Nobody really paid attention to the two hour snorecast (except Larry Dignan at Cnet—thank you Larry for sitting through it so the rest of us didn’t have to).

To be fair, some people who have seen it are very excited about the Wolfram search engine (Nova Spivack, for one, argues persuasively that it is going to be big). But it is hard to get excited about canned demos and promises of computer science breakthroughs. Google’s structured data search might be relatively simplistic but at least it isn’t vaporware. Google actually launched it. Anyone can try it out. When will Wolfram do the same and let people actually play with his vaunted search engine? It is going to take more than a leaked screenshot to convince anyone that Wolfram has something Google doesn’t or can’t build in a year.

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