SXSW: Stephen Wolfram Jumps On Bandwagon For Cloud, Mobile Devices 36
Nerval's Lobster writes "At this year's SXSW conference, Stephen Wolfram—most famous in tech circles as the chief designer of the Mathematica software platform, as well as the Wolfram Alpha 'computation knowledge engine'—demonstrated his upcoming Programming Cloud, and indicated he was developing a mobile platform for engineering and mathematical applications based on the Wolfram programming language built for Mathematica. He also talked more broadly about the future of Wolfram Alpha, which he said will become more anticipatory of peoples' queries. 'People generally don't understand all the things that Wolfram Alpha can do,' Wolfram told the audience. His researchers are also working on a system modeler tool, which will allow researchers to simulate complex devices with tens of thousands of components; in theory, you could even use such a platform for 3D printing. Wolfram also wants to set Wolfram Alpha loose on documents, with the ability to apply complex calculations to, say, company spreadsheets. 'A whole bunch of things that I've been working on for 30 years are converging in a very nice way,' he said."
Alpha has too many pro links (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't mind pay services, and I don't mind free trials, but Wolfram Alpha somehow manages to rub me the wrong way. It seems that if you have any arbitrary calculation, just about every point on the page you can click asks you to upgrade to pro. Images are poststamp size and hardly readable. They make a zoom button and it pops up a 'upgrade to pro' screen if you click it. They show you a bunch of paragraphs in an outcome, with 'requires interactivity', which you have to pay for, which you only find out when you try to enable interactivity. Why not just say 'requires wolfram alpha pro' or such then?
I don't mind that you have to pay for it, but I do mind that they make it seem like an available function, don't mark it in any special way, and then come with a 'upgrade to pro' window when you click it.
In my opinion they should put some more intellectual honesty there. I would probably pay for this service if it didn't seem they like to trick you into paying all over. If I take a subscription now I would feel bad about being tricked into it.