“Fact engine” Wolfram Alpha to ship Android version and new APIs/widgets

Yesterday Wolfram Alpha’s CEO, Barak Berkowitz, visited me and gave me an update on the latest behind this really great “fact engine.”

What do we need it for? Well, let’s say you want to know a fact like “what is the mean temperature in San Francisco in July?” Yeah, you can try to use Google for that, but it’s a lot nicer in Wolfram Alpha.

Or, let’s say you want to compare the stock prices of Rackspace, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Yeah, you can play around with Google Finance, or some other search engine, but look at what Wolfram Alpha does. Awesome!

In fact, you can even build a little widget using Wolfram Alpha. Here’s my widget, try it out!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/widget/widget.jsp?id=a3a8381281635a1926bd3ea09f29f4d9

These widgets are now improved but better yet within 45 days Wolfram Alpha will announce a new API pricing scheme which will let developers use Wolfram Alpha in their own apps for far less money than they can today. That’s awesome, because you can think of a world where data is shoved over to Wolfram Alpha and it will return facts about that data. Try it out, or watch the video to get a taste of some of the things it is good at.