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Yesterday, Wolfram Alpha announced the price drop of its iPhone app and the return of its mobile site. Today, after Apple itself broke a press embargo that was originally set for Saturday, Wolfram Alpha is also announcing the launch of its iPad app, as well as the launch of its new Wolfram Alpha for e-books program. The fact that Wolfram Alpha would launch an iPad app - which will retail in a bundle with the iPhone app for $1.99 - doesn't really come as a shock. The e-book program, however, comes as a bit of a surprise, but makes perfect sense in light of Wolfram's new push towards making Wolfram Alpha ubiquitous.

Google just announced that it now uses public data from the World Bank to display graphs for queries like "children per woman in brazil" or "internet users in the united states." To do so, Google makes uses of the World Bank's public API. Through this, Google can access 17 World Development Indicators. Google displays this data in interactive graphs that make it easy to compare stats for different countries. The timing of this announcement was likely planned to coincide with the news about Wolfram Alpha's integration with Microsoft's Bing.

When Wolfram Research released its iPhone app for Wolfram Alpha earlier this week, most of the attention quickly shifted away from the features of the app itself and towards the high price of the app. At $49.99, Wolfram Alpha is far more expensive than most apps in the App Store today, where only a small number of highly specialized apps sell for more than $9.99. Today, we got a chance to discuss Wolfram's pricing strategy with Schoeller Porter, the product manager for Wolfram Alpha's iPhone app.

Quite a bit ahead of schedule, Wolfram Alpha's iPhone app appeared in the iTunes App Store today. The app, which costs $49.99, gives users full access to Wolfram Alpha's capabilities and greatly improves on the speed and ergonomics of Wolfram Alpha's mobile site. The company is targeting this app at students and professionals and marketing it as a replacement for stand-alone graphing calculators, which is clearly reflected in the price.

For the earliest of early adopters, the concept of a service like LaunchSet sounds like being buddies with the biggest, coolest club promoter in town: Get a first look at pre-launch sites for testing and feedback before anyone else on the block.

For already stressed startups, LaunchSet provides a valuable service: Management of registrations and analytics during the packed-to-the-gills months, weeks, and days between launching private and public versions of a site or app.

Wolfram Alpha, the new "computational knowledge engine" from the makers of Mathematica is scheduled to officially launch on Monday next week, but starting tonight, Alpha will 'soft launch,' starting with a live webcast of the launch preparations tonight. After that, Alpha will gradually open its doors to everybody throughout the weekend. We have had a chance to test a preview version of Alpha for the last seven days, and we are quite impressed with what we have seen so far. Here are some resources for getting up to speed with Alpha, as well as some recommendations for getting started with this powerful, but sometimes frustrating new tool.

Wolfram Alpha, the hyped "Google killer" will officially launch on May 18, but we already got preview access to it today, and had a chance to put it through its paces.

Let's get this out of the way quickly: Wolfram Alpha is not (yet?) geared towards mainstream Internet users, who, for the most part, are still better served by Google. Of course, comparing Alpha to Google isn't even fair, but most users will treat it like Google, and will most likely come away sorely disappointed. Instead, Alpha, for now, is going to be a great tool for students, engineers, and academics - and anybody who needs data quickly and knows how to interpret it. It takes some time to learn how to best use Alpha, and it still has its rough patches, but, overall, we have come away quite impressed, though, at times we were also frustrated.

Last weekend, we attended a web demo of Wolfram Alpha, a new "computational knowledge engine" based on the work of Stephen Wolfram. Some have dubbed Alpha a "Google killer," but, in reality, it is very different from the standard search engines that we are all familiar with today.

When we got the demo, Wolfram asked us to refrain from publishing any screenshots. Today, however, the Berkman Center posted a video of the public demo Wolfram gave earlier this week, so we think it's only fair that we share our own screenshots with our readers at this point.

The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next "Google killer" from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we've seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype - though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a "Google killer." According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information.