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Wolfram Alpha to Launch Live on Justin.TV
- justin 17y agoExcited to see it in action and get a chance to play with it myself!
- 27182818284 17y agoThe actual blog post at http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/going-live-and-webcasting-it/ http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/going-live-and-webca... says, "We’ll be making our first attempt to go live with Wolfram|Alpha this Friday evening, May 15. We’ll start webcasting our preparations at 7pm CDT (UTC -5)." I don't know how I feel about a Friday night launch. On the one hand the weekend allows for fixing problems, but on the other hand they are doing a webcast and have been building publicity for more than a month.
- TweedHeads 17y agoTuesday is the best marketing day for everything.
- pg 17y agoExcept everyone thinks that, which means there is more competition for attention on Tues than any other day.
- quizbiz 17y agowhy?
- TweedHeads 17y agoSaturdays and Sundays are dead. Fridays are almost bad as nobody will remember you next monday. Thursdays gives you just one more day to digest your offering. Now you have mondays, tuesdays or wednesdays left. Mondays are catch-up days, everybody getting up to the minute with meetings, planning, late tasks, errands, etc. Wednesdays are good, very good, but no better than tuesdays, which gives you three more days for penetration, attention, conversation and full digestion. So, even if wednesdays are good, tuesdays are better.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- programnature 17y agoIn the meantime, they just released a screencast demo done by Stephen Wolfram. It seems to be getting lost in the other news of the day but its pretty cool. http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/13/stephen-wolframs-introduction-to-wolframalpha/ http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/13/stephen-wolframs-int...
- martythemaniak 17y agoAfter seeing that, I strongly suspect my browser will get a 3rd text box next go the google search.
- gustavo_duarte 17y agoWhoah! I've used Mathematica a lot and I had high expectations for Wolfram Alpha, but this... was just incredible. Thank you so much for posting it. I wonder if they'd consider opening the system up for others to develop 'plug-ins' covering more knowledge areas.
- abstractbill 17y agoThat is some really amazing stuff. I can't wait to play with it myself.
- ErrantX 17y agoone thing that strikes me how can it logically say "the gdp of france / italy" should be interpreted as "the gdp of france divided by the gdp of Italy" that makes no sense to me.... clearly the context suggests that I want to know the GDP of both countries side by side. Actually im underwhelmed by it :( which is sad.
- gustavo_duarte 17y agoHe mentions that simply putting items in a series would generate comparisons, so I think you'd get what you want by taking out the / operator. (edited, no need for "vs.", just series seems to do the trick)
- noodle 17y ago
- ErrantX 17y agoBig fail going with Justin.tv. A lot of us refuse to use it because they still insist on spammy popups :( A coup for justin.tv though.
- emmett 17y agoPopups? You mean video overlay ads?
- abstractbill 17y agoSpammy popups? Definitely not to my knowledge. If anyone ever sees anything like this, please do take a screen-grab and email it to me - bill@justin.tv
- quizbiz 17y agoGod, I love HN
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ErrantX 17y agoWhenever I visit justin.tv I get a "blocking a popup from justin.tv" notice on FF bar. At work w/o the popup blocker it opens a poker popup. I seem to recall it is just some pages though - I will dig out a screeny. EDIT: voila: http://screencast.com/t/rP72HQ0UG http://screencast.com/t/rP72HQ0UG
- catch23 17y agoyou sure you don't have a virus on your computer? most viruses will put spammy popups on other people's web pages.
- 27182818284 17y agoI don't like the idea of a web cast for something like this, but if I were going to do one, I would use something like Hulu which is all the rage right now anyway. It is marketing, and Hulu has been getting a lot more air time than Justin.tv
- pj 17y agoThe success of WA is going to depend on the comprehensiveness of the data sets. If the user goes there and wants an answer and the topic of interest isn't in their dataset, then the user will revert to Google and wade through the results and read text to find the answers. It doesn't appear to me that WA is searching text based information at all, rather these are tabular datasets that are carefully organized and queried to provide the user information. Google is just looking for strings of text and especially strings of text from pages that have conformed to its requirements for SEO-ness leading to mostly marketing type information, where as WA is looking for facts and numbers. I think most of the world doesn't really care about the kind of results they'll get from WA, but I don't care about that. I think WA is a beautiful product. It isn't a google killer. Only those without a valid understanding of information would call it a google killer. And Google Squared has nothing on WA. G^2 is just an attempt to steal WA's thunder. If Google would go to such extremes to hinder WA with their G^2, what does that say about Google's confidence in their product? For too long, google has ridden on a history of good search results, but really, Google isn't much of an innovator. Most of their innovations were actually acquisitions. Eric Schmidt himself has said Google is not an innovator. Here, WA is the innovator. Google is a me too and has been since their inception.
- stcredzero 17y agoThe success of WA is going to depend on the comprehensiveness of the data sets. If you are correct, then WA can only get better and better over time. (Barring total incompetence.) So long as they can make good use of the failed queries, the user-base itself will guide what they include next. Here, WA is the innovator. Google is a me too and has been since their inception. The implication here that Google is the new Microsoft.
- wmeredith 17y agoThis is contrarian BS. In terms of SERP quality it was like discovering another dimension when web pages started being assigned value based on incoming links vs. on-page content. It might have been all acquisitions after they got rich off that, but it was a huge deal. I don't think it can be overstated in the terms of how it's affected the internet, it changed everything.
- natch 17y agoI'm betting we'll see big-time video streaming fail when this happens. The people planning these events seem always to underestimate the bandwidth that is needed.
- abstractbill 17y agoI'm betting we won't. Justin.TV has supported more than 700,000 simultaneous viewers already. As cool as I think Wolfram Alpha is, I don't think the launch will get that many viewers.
- Mazy 17y agoI think he's referring to the bandwidth needed on the broadcast side. It's not much, 300 Kbps up will do, but there are plenty of times where people do these events on shared connections etc. Always frustrating.
- abstractbill 17y agoOk, that's a good point - it's always frustrating for us when people try to broadcast on a connection that really can't handle it.
- stcredzero 17y agoHe will probably make a ton of money implementing this sort of system for corporations and their internal data.